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Cad’s Cadenzas

Christopher Driver, 15 September 1988

William Walton: Behind the Façade 
by Susana Walton.
Oxford, 255 pp., £12.95, February 1988, 0 19 315156 1
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Façade: Edith Sitwell Interpreted 
by Pamela Hunter.
Duckworth, 106 pp., £10.95, September 1987, 9780715621844
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... how the 17-year-old Christ Church music scholar might or might have not developed had Sacheverell Sitwell not met him and decided that his ‘very clever-shaped head’ recalled John Wesley. Of William’s Sitwell friends, Sachie was the intimate, however exhausting: ‘one weekend at Sachie’s house in Weston, he had ...

Sacred Monster

Graham Hough, 20 August 1981

Edith SitwellA Unicorn among Lions 
by Victoria Glendinning.
Weidenfeld, 391 pp., £9.95, July 1981, 0 297 77801 3
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... where we never know what it is we are being asked to admire, their life-style or their art. Edith Sitwell comes in this class, and Victoria Glendinning’s biography brings these dubieties to the surface again. She is much aware of them herself, and she begins her book by asking – or almost asking – the unforgivable, inescapable preliminary question: is ...

Attila the Hus

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 4 November 1982

Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley 1896-1933 
by Nicholas Mosley.
Secker, 274 pp., £8.95, October 1982, 0 436 28849 4
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... an affair with a mutual friend with whom they had been in Venice the previous summer. (Georgia Sitwell: ‘Of course we all went to bed with him, but afterwards we were rather ashamed.’) Anxious to speak in Parliament about a crisis in Mesopotamia, Mosley returned to England ten days before his wife. The following quotations are from the letters they ...

Knives, Wounds, Bows

John Bayley, 2 April 1987

Randall Jarrell’s Letters 
edited by Mary Jarrell.
Faber, 540 pp., £25, January 1986, 0 571 13829 2
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The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore 
edited by Patricia Willis.
Faber, 723 pp., £30, January 1987, 0 571 14788 7
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... of ‘all this fiddle’, as graceful in her reading of Stevens or Cummings or Harold Monro, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell (‘if not purely modern, properly within the new movement’) as in her considered praise of the millionaire poet Scofield Thayer: ‘a new Victorian – reflective, bi-visioned, and rather ...

Into the Southern Playground

Julian Bell: The Suspect Adrian Stokes, 21 August 2003

'The Quattro Cento’ and ‘Stones of Rimini’ 
by Adrian Stokes.
Ashgate, 668 pp., £16.99, August 2002, 0 7546 3320 9
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Art and Its Discontents 
by Richard Read.
Ashgate, 260 pp., £35, December 2002, 0 7546 0796 8
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... the words most memoirs settle for – he had been lately admitted to the aristocratic circle of Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, and was offering sexual favours to the former. Osbert had encouraged a shift in the young writer’s interests from Bradleyan philosophy towards Italian ...

Coup de Guinness

Robert Morley, 5 December 1985

Blessings in Disguise 
by Alec Guinness.
Hamish Hamilton, 238 pp., £9.95, October 1985, 0 241 11681 3
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... by an old friend. Guinness occasionally offends but he also makes up for it. The chapter on Edith Sitwell is wonderfully funny. A luncheon at her club when this tremendously self-important poetess, temporarily disconcerted by a bluebottle caught in the Venetian blinds, affected a swoon until the insect was dispatched is worthy of Lytton Strachey; as is the ...

Teaching English in the Far East

William Empson, 17 August 1989

... to talk correctly, or even, what is much worse, trying to talk charmingly. I think it was Sir Osbert Sitwell who first pointed out that all forms of the charming voice are deliberately made impossible to hear, so that the little group has to crane its ears. Now the purpose of speaking is to be heard, and nothing else is nearly so important as being ...

A Toast at the Trocadero

Terry Eagleton: D.J. Taylor, 18 February 2016

The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England since 1918 
by D.J. Taylor.
Chatto, 501 pp., £25, January 2016, 978 0 7011 8613 5
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... to say in their favour. In this latest study, he even puts in a good word for the preposterous Sitwell family, having first given them a roasting for their insufferable self-importance, on the grounds that Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell were at least serious about literature. Too much so, one might claim. The surreal ...

The World of School

John Bayley, 28 September 1989

The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and his Friends 
by Humphrey Carpenter.
Weidenfeld, 523 pp., £17.95, September 1989, 0 297 79320 9
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OsbertA Portrait of Osbert Lancaster 
by Richard Boston.
Collins, 256 pp., £17.50, August 1989, 0 00 216324 1
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Ackerley: A Life of J.R. Ackerley 
by Peter Parker.
Constable, 465 pp., £16.95, September 1989, 0 09 469000 6
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... they ordered. Ordinary readers, too, get a kick from being excluded. When Waugh converted, Edith Sitwell remarked absently to him that she saw no point in becoming a Catholic unless one belonged to one of the old Catholic families. This sense of things was not only vital to Waugh as an artist, but provided the imaginative framework which gave depth and power ...

Catacomb Graffiti

Clive James, 20 December 1979

Poems and Journeys 
by Charles Johnston.
Bodley Head, 97 pp., £3.90
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Eugene Onegin 
by Alexander Pushkin, translated by Charles Johnston.
Penguin Classics, 238 pp., £1.50
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... ambiguity in the third line, incidentally, is less a grammatical error than a mark of class. Osbert Lancaster and Anthony Powell have both always let their participles dangle with abandon, and Evelyn Waugh, in the same chapter of his autobiography which tells us that only those who have studied Latin can write English, perpetrates at least one sentence ...

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