Daily Mail

AFTER THE PARTY

- by Cressida Connolly

(Viking £14.99) TheRe are two parties here: one, the British Union of Fascists, the other a decadent ball with a tragic end.

Uniting them is Phyllis Forrester — pleasant, privileged and pressed by her sister into supporting oswald Mosley’s ‘Movement’.

With the outbreak of war, however, her activities see her interned first in london, and then on the Isle of Man, an experience she reflects on some 40 years later in a confession­al narrative that proves unexpected­ly heart-breaking.

Connolly has tremendous fun with her posh characters’ classobses­sed milieu, but the privations of holloway Prison, with its rope-thick dust, bone-chilling cold and maggoty food, are equally sharply drawn.

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