During the visit in 1989 Mosley was working on the final draft of Hopeful Monsters, and on the return trip to England (through Spain and France by caravan) we stopped at the two Spanish historical sites which were very important settings of his story: Castle Loarre and the monastery San Juan de la Peña, in Aragon (where the Holy Grail was said to have been kept for a time and on one of the pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela ). The novel had been an enormous undertaking, and as it was the last of the linked “Catastrophe Practice” books - their “culmination”, so to speak - it would undoubtedly be one of his major works.

   After my return to Canada I began to think that if there were ever to be any film or video documenting of Mosley’s life then it should be started before he left the villa: aside from its significance to him (and to me), it was a filmmaker’s dream location. However there was no evidence that anyone whose business it is to make documentaries had any interest in such a project.  It happened that a younger friend of mine, John Corry, who had studied literature and was interested in Mosley’s writings, was soon to be finishing his courses in filmmaking at the university. He was ready for such an adventure, and Mosley was willing, so early in 1990 it was all arranged. At the time the videomaking seemed to be a natural extension of the work I was already doing - I would be visiting him again anyway - and taping discussions was not a great task. My original plan was to acquire the video material “for posterity”, but then Hopeful Monsters won the Whitbread Prize and it became reasonable to acquire material that would be useable for television broadcast. This required more planning, more taping, and much more attention to what are called the “production values”.
 

The first sessions, in the Spring of 1991 (at the villa, the picturesque cottage in Sussex, and in Mosley’s Hampstead apartment), yielded about fourteen hours of material, covering a very wide range of topics: his early years and war experiences, the evolution of his approach to writing, and links between his work and topics in philosophy and science. (Clearly little of this could be included in a fifty-minute program.) In the mornings, before the daily taping sessions, Mosley was working on his autobiography Efforts at Truth and a treatment for a film version of Hopeful Monsters, consequently most of the taping did simply document the sort of talk that is part of “work in progress” - especially as it became easier to ignore the camera and the technical inconveniences.     The publicity generated by Hopeful Monsters did not stimulate any serious interest among broadcasters, and I did not have the large funds needed for elaborate post-production, so for a few years the tapes were set aside. However in 1995 I was able to take advantage of the developments in computer and video technology which were making it possible to edit videotape for comparitively little cost (except of time, of course). In 1997 I visited Mosley again, with Yolande du Gardein-Matson, and we taped a further eight hours of material - which is again very wide-ranging - and some of this is included in “Nicholas Mosley: Writing Life.” This program was designed to serve as an introduction to Mosley’s views and to his approach to writing, for a general, discerning audience, however it is unlike most biographical profiles of authors: I believed that - whenever it was possible - Mosley's story should be told through his own words, that in this way the style of the program might be fitted to the style of his writing, which is to engage the reader in the process of  making connections.