Diana Mosley

In 1936, she married Mosley at the home of the propaganda minister for Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler as guest of honour.

[3] Mosley's 1989 appearance on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs was controversial due to her Holocaust denial and admiration of Hitler.

[8][9][6] Diana Mitford was the fourth child and third daughter of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale (1878–1958), and his wife Sydney (1880–1963).

Diana's parents were opposed to the engagement but in time were persuaded; Sydney was particularly uneasy at the thought of two such young people having possession of such a large fortune, but she was eventually convinced Bryan was a suitable husband.

The writer Evelyn Waugh exclaimed that her beauty "ran through the room like a peal of bells", and he dedicated the novel Vile Bodies to her.

In February 1932, Diana met Sir Oswald Mosley at a garden party at the home of the society hostess Emerald Cunard.

Diana left her husband, "moving with a skeleton staff of nanny, cook, house-parlourmaid and lady's maid to a house at 2 Eaton Square, round the corner from Mosley's flat",[18] but Sir Oswald would not leave his wife.

Mosley was devastated by the death of his wife, but later started an affair with her younger sister, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe.

[19][page needed] Mitford's parents did not approve of her decision to leave Guinness for Mosley, and she was briefly estranged from most of her family.

[19][page needed] The couple rented Wootton Lodge, a country house in Staffordshire that Diana had intended to buy.

Diana and Oswald secretly married on 6 October 1936 in the drawing room of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.

The Mosleys were interned during much of the Second World War, under Defence Regulation 18B, along with other British fascists including Norah Elam.

After more than three years' imprisonment, they were both released in November 1943 on the grounds of Mosley's ill health; they were placed under house arrest until the end of the war and were denied passports until 1949.

[25] According to an anecdote in her The Daily Telegraph obituary, Evelyn Waugh saw Lady Mosley wear a diamond swastika brooch among her jewels as she left prison.

"[26] At other times, however, she behaved so as to suggest intense anti-semitic attitudes; the journalist Paul Callan remembered mentioning that he was Jewish while interviewing her husband in Diana's presence.

Her appearance on the BBC Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs with Sue Lawley in 1989 remains controversial due to Mosley's Holocaust denial and admiration of Hitler.

[4] Mosley told Lawley that she had not believed the extermination of Jews by Nazi Germany until "years" after the war, and that she thought the official death figure of six million Jewish victims was too high.

[29] The broadcast of this episode had to be rescheduled several times because it kept coinciding with Jewish holidays[26] and prompted hundreds of complaints to the BBC.

41 (Mozart), "Casta Diva" from Norma (Bellini), "Ode to Joy" (Beethoven), Die Walküre (Wagner), Liebestod (Wagner), "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle" from Carmen (Bizet), "A Whiter Shade of Pale" (Procol Harum) and Polonaise in F-sharp minor (Chopin).

"[33] In 1998, due to her advancing age, she moved out of the Temple de la Gloire and into an apartment in the 7th arrondissement of Paris.

[34] Mosley attended the funeral of René de Chambrun, the son-in-law of Vichy France Prime Minister Pierre Laval, in 2002.

[35] Mosley was shunned in the British media for a period after the war, and the couple established their own publishing company, Euphorion Books, named after a character in Goethe's Faust.

[37] In her eighties, Mosley became the lead reviewer for the London Evening Standard during A. N. Wilson's seven-year tenure as literary editor.

[38] In 1996, following Wilson's departure, his successor was asked by the new editor of the newspaper, Max Hastings to stop running Mosley's reviews.

Her cause of death was given as complications related to a stroke she had suffered a week earlier, but reports later surfaced that she had been one of the many elderly fatalities of the heat wave of 2003 in mostly non-air-conditioned Paris.

[41] British journalist Andrew Roberts criticised Mosley following her death in the pages of The Daily Telegraph (16 August 2003), reporting that when he interviewed her for his book Eminent Churchillians, she had surprised him by not serving up a "David Irving-style refutation" of the Holocaust by declaring "I'm sure he [Hitler] was to blame for the extermination of the Jews.

However, her other remarks about Hitler showed the lifelong "same disdain for equivocation" she had always displayed, prompting him to call her an "unrepentant Nazi and effortlessly charming", and her views "disgusting, unchanged" and "repulsive".

[8] A. N. Wilson wrote for the same newspaper and said that her public loyalty for Oswald and Hitler were disastrous mistakes, claiming that privately Mosley had admitted that the Nazis were "really rather awful".

[34] Three days later, letters to the editor from both her son, Jonathan Guinness, Lord Moyne, and his daughter (her granddaughter), Daphne Guinness, attempted to refute Roberts' statements by citing her "lack of hypocrisy", claiming Mosley's "upper-class etiquette" would prohibit giving any sort of explanation or an apology to a journalist, and that regardless of her giving a Hitler salute during the singing of God Save The King in 1935, she was never a threat to wartime Britain.

[43] An equally "indulgently dismissive attitude" of her opinions was seconded in the Sunday edition in an interview with her stepson Nicholas Mosley, with whom she had refused to speak for over two decades after the publication of Beyond the Pale, his unfavorable memoir of her husband.

Diana Mitford and Bryan Guinness on their honeymoon in Taormina , Italy, in 1929.
Diana and Oswald Mosley wearing their fascist uniforms in 1936.