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Thanks to the Fels-Naptha Soap King

Miles Taylor: George Lansbury, 22 May 2003

George Lansbury: At the Heart of Old Labour 
by John Shepherd.
Oxford, 407 pp., £35, September 2002, 0 19 820164 8
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... Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, the young Rebecca West (briefly) and Osbert Sitwell, in addition to G.D.H. Cole and the gifted cartoonist Will Dyson. Later, as leader of the Labour Party in the 1930s, Lansbury presided over a renaissance of intellectual socialism, as Fabians, Socialist Leaguers, ILP-ers, and a long tail of ...

Great Fun

John Bayley, 22 January 1987

Gossip 
by Patricia Meyer Spacks.
Chicago, 287 pp., £9.25, November 1986, 0 226 76844 9
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The Bonus of Laughter 
by Alan Pryce-Jones.
Hamish Hamilton, 263 pp., £12.95, January 1987, 0 241 11903 0
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... It is clear that he gets on with everybody, and never quarrels or makes bad blood. It is true that Osbert Sitwell inexplicably never spoke to him again after a mutual consultation in which both were in friendly agreement over the shortcomings of Edith Sitwell’s posthumous autobiography. On the basis of this ...

Blowing Cigarette Smoke at Greenfly

E.S. Turner: The Beastliness of Saki, 24 August 2000

The Unrest-Cure and Other Beastly Tales 
by Saki.
Prion, 297 pp., £8.99, May 2000, 9781853753701
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... side to be heart-stoppingly hideous. Saki’s silly asses, or smartasses, had something of what Osbert Sitwell described as ‘concave and fatigued elegance’. There was no need to be epicene in order to throw off epigrams, but it helped. These soigné posers were decidedly not the sort of young men who cannot wait to turn their sisters into ...

Porcupined

John Bayley, 22 June 1989

The Essential Wyndham Lewis 
edited by Julian Symons.
Deutsch, 380 pp., £17.95, April 1989, 0 233 98376 7
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... Apes of God. Symons suggests comparing a portrait, even a photograph, with this prose picture of Osbert Sitwell, served up as Lord Osmund Finnian-Shaw. In colour Lord Osmund was pale coral, with flaxen hair brushed tightly back, his blond pencilled pap rising straight from his sloping forehead: galb-like wings to his nostrils – the goat-like profile ...

Diners-out

E.S. Turner, 3 July 1986

Augustus Hare: Victorian Gentleman 
by Malcolm Barnes.
Allen and Unwin, 240 pp., £20, May 1986, 9780049201002
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Midway on the Waves 
by James Lees-Milne.
Faber, 248 pp., £10.95, October 1985, 0 571 13723 7
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... to drink’, which may well have stimulated Nancy Mitford to write her essay on Hare.) Sir Osbert Sitwell has testified to the mild panic which met Hare’s arrival at a garden party at Renishaw, when ‘the ladies held their hats to their heads and fled, fearing that he might include them in his next book.’ A useful peep, to be ...

We were the Lambert boys

Paul Driver, 22 May 1986

The Lamberts: George, Constant and Kit 
by Andrew Motion.
Chatto, 388 pp., £13.95, April 1986, 0 7011 2731 7
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... possessed of a deep and strange Englishness), or crucially transforms its text by Sacheverell Sitwell and assures itself a popularity, again like Façade’s, beyond the ephemeral. The Rio Grande (1927) – a mere quarter-of-an-hour of music for chorus, an orchestra woodwind-less but heavy with percussion, and prominent piano obbligato – is sui generis ...

Maisie’s Sisters

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Sargent’s Daughters, 5 August 2010

Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting 
by Erica Hirshler.
MFA, 262 pp., £23.95, October 2009, 978 0 87846 742 6
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... the Gilded Age only encouraged the imputations of superficiality. ‘Looking at his portraits’, Osbert Sitwell said, Sargent’s subjects ‘understood at last how rich they really were’. ‘Le chef de rayon de la peinture’ – the department store manager of painting – is how Degas characterised him. John Singer Sargent, ‘The Daughters of ...

The Last Intellectual

Rosemary Hill: The Queen Mother’s Letters, 6 December 2012

Counting One’s Blessings: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother 
edited by William Shawcross.
Macmillan, 666 pp., £25, October 2012, 978 0 230 75496 6
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... of middle-aged Britons; ‘what a lot of war we have seen in our generation,’ she wrote to Osbert Sitwell, noting how her own daughters were growing up as she had done, puzzled and alarmed by their parents’ sadness. Her contemporaries were always her most consistent admirers. This shared experience of war was surely the reason and this the ...

Two Ediths and a Hermit

Raleigh Trevelyan, 5 September 1985

... Therefore I used pseudonyms. Now I can say that a character I called Lady Kathleen V – was Edith Sitwell. She and I became friends eventually, but for a while I was in hot water. It began with my discovery of the diary of Jimmy Mason, known as the Hermit of Great Canfield, in the loft of my parents’ house. I was 16 at the time, and any schoolboy would have ...

Sunday Best

Mark Ford: Wilfred Owen’s Letters, 26 September 2024

Selected Letters of Wilfred Owen 
edited by Jane Potter.
Oxford, 436 pp., £25, August 2023, 978 0 19 968950 7
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... friendships with Sassoon and Ross, by late 1917 he was moving in a circle of gay men that included Osbert Sitwell and C.K. Scott Moncrieff – who would translate Proust and who shared with Owen a love of Alec Waugh’s ardent public school romance, The Loom of Youth (roughly the equivalent of wearing a green carnation). He also met Graves, whose wedding ...

Trouble down there

Ferdinand Mount: Tea with Sassoon, 7 August 2003

Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet 1886-1918 
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Duckworth, 600 pp., £9.99, September 2002, 0 7156 2894 1
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Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches 1918-67 
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Duckworth, 526 pp., £30, April 2003, 0 7156 2971 9
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Sassoon: The Worlds of Philip and Sybil 
by Peter Stansky.
Yale, 295 pp., £25, April 2003, 0 300 09547 3
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... pretending that their kinship was rather distant. The one time they met properly, at dinner with Osbert Sitwell, Philip told Sitwell how bad ‘The Old Huntsman’ was, while Siegfried told him how jealous Philip was of his literary fame. During the General Strike, Siegfried enjoyed contemplating the possibility that ...

Hobohemianism

Blake Morrison, 30 June 2011

The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp 
by W.H. Davies.
Amberley, 192 pp., £14.99, September 2010, 978 1 84868 980 0
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... bad if 30 sheep only died out of 2000. Davies did not always feel the same compassion for humans. Osbert Sitwell, who knew him later in London, was struck by his animosity to black men, and the autobiography bears him out. An eyewitness account of a lynching near Memphis is devoid of any sympathy for the victim. And after being mugged in the ...

Talking about Manure

Rosemary Hill: Hilda Matheson’s Voice, 25 January 2024

Hilda Matheson: A Life of Secrets and Broadcasts 
by Michael Carney and Kate Murphy.
Handheld, 260 pp., £13.99, September 2023, 978 1 912766 72 7
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... or capital punishment.’ This outburst was prompted by his resistance to a talk on modern art by Osbert Sitwell unless there were a counterbalancing talk on the Victorians or classical art. Matheson first met Sackville-West in April 1928, when she made her first broadcast. She was a natural. Her voice was pitched low enough to avoid the frequent ...

No False Modesty

Rosemary Hill: Edith Sitwell, 20 October 2011

Edith SitwellAvant-Garde Poet, English Genius 
by Richard Greene.
Virago, 532 pp., £25, March 2011, 978 1 86049 967 8
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... to hang bells in’ was, apparently, the response of one American visitor to a portrait of Edith Sitwell in the Tate. Elizabeth Bowen, herself an imposing physical presence, described Sitwell in real life as like ‘a high altar on the move’, and Virginia Woolf, on first encountering her in 1918, noted that she was ‘a ...

The History Boy

Alan Bennett: Exam-taking, 3 June 2004

... on who Virginia Woolf was or put them in the picture about Lady Ottoline Morrell; Sapper, Buchan, Osbert Sitwell – to the boys these must have been names only, familiar to the principal players, John Gielgud and Paul Eddington, but as remote to the rest of the cast as historical figures in Shakespeare. This omission was partly because with only four ...

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