Books: Springtime for Mosley

OSWALD MOSLEY

by ROBERT SKIDELSKY

578 pages. Holt, Rinehart &

Winston. $15.

The world knows Sir Oswald Mosley best at his worst—as the leader of the Union of British Fascists, who, flanked by black-shirted Biff Boys in the 1930s, praised Mussolini and Hitler and parroted their antiSemitism. But in fact, Mosley, now 78, has mesmerized, enraged and even amused generations of Englishmen, first as a Conservative M.P., then as an Independent Liberal, a Socialist Laborite, a Fascist isolationist and, finally, as a postwar internationalist preaching European unity. As the sixth in a line of...