In hundreds of hours of taped interviews, Diana Mosley not only spoke to the author with extreme frankness about her life and beliefs but, during the course of several years, gave unprecedented access to her private papers, letters and diaries. The only stipulation made by Lady Mosley was that this book should not be published until after her death. She was born the Hon. Diana Mitford in 1910. The most beautiful and the cleverest of the six Mitford sisters, she was eighteen when she married Bryan Guinness, who was fabulously wealthy. After four years, she left him for the fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, who was a married man (his wife was Lord Curzon's daughter, Cimmie). Diana set herself up as Mosley's mistress - a course of action that horrified her family and scandalised society. In 1933 she took her sister Unity to Germany; soon both had met the new German leader, Adolf Hitler. Diana became so close to him that when she and Mosley married in 1936 (after the death of Mosley's wife) the ceremony took place in the Goebbels' drawing room and Hitler was guest of honour. She continued to visit Hitler until a month before the outbreak of war. During the Second World War, she was held in Holloway prison without trial. For years she refused to believe in the reality of the Holocaust, and until her dying day (she died in Paris in August 2003) she was unyielding in her adoration of Mosley and affection for Hitler. This gripping book is a portrait both of an extraordinary individual and the strange, terrible world of political extremism in the 1930s.

"From the Hardcover edition.