Saturday, January 10, 2009

Just A Reminder: Diana Mosley

A representative of a certain upper-class British elite (that had an ability to get us in trouble)

In 1936, Diana secretly married Oswald Mosley in Goebbels's drawing room in Berlin, with Hitler as the guest of honour. Goebbels and Hitler are mentioned often in her book reviews, but never critically. Goebbels, for instance, was "brilliant" and "good company". After the war, Diana did not renounce her former sympathies - though the Holocaust, she eventually admitted, was an unfortunate and nasty thing - and her tendency here is to nitpick with historians, apparently regarding their work as the mere propaganda of the victors.

The ticking-off she dishes out to Hugh Trevor-Roper for describing Goebbels's villa as palatial - "It was comfortable, but by no effort of the imagination could it have been called luxurious... it was not as palatial as Number 11 Downing Street" - would be laugh-out-loud funny were it not for the fact that it is Goebbels for whom she is so pedantically trying to stick up, Goebbels, the burner of books, whom she praises for having been well read.


Source

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