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“... In February 1940, a Reynolds News reviewer wrote of the three Sitwells, Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell: ‘Now oblivion has claimed them, and they are remembered with a kindly if slightly cynical smile.’ And this, I suppose, is more or less how they are thought of now. Edith’s dark vowels still find their way into anthologies ...”

“... them’ is doomed to failure in advance. Neither Michael Bloch’s cautious scholarship nor Osbert Sitwell’s posthumous malice will erode posterity’s obstinate penchant for romantic love. Having said that, it has to be admitted that both the volumes under review are full of historical insights of the most intriguing and unexpected kind. At the ...”

“... the First World War, Ada Leverson’s company was sought by a younger generation of gifted men (Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Harold and Willie Acton, Ronald Firbank, Raymond Mortimer) who saw her as an intriguing survivor from the faded Yellow Book past. Encouraged by these, she published a slim volume containing her ...”

“... First World War seem now to have been leisure’s golden age. Recalling the summers of 1913-14, Osbert Sitwell noted that ‘one band in a house was no longer enough, there must be two, three even.’ House parties were distinguished by an abundance of exotic flowers, and mounds of peaches, figs, nectarines and strawberries ripening in ‘steamy tents ...”

“... an American interviewer, who was surprised to find that Waley’s recreation was skiing (or, as Osbert Sitwell puts it, ‘practising obsolete Esquimaux tricks’), but only as a lone figure on the high snow slopes. ‘His gesture was courtly in salutation,’ wrote Basil Gray: ‘he enjoyed conversation, but never spoke himself unless he had something ...”

“... front-line mind’. Artists and poets and writers generally show a particular dislike of warfare; Osbert Sitwell sees it as necessarily coincident with a hatred of poetry and a contempt for beauty; it is in the British in particular that D.H. Lawrence judges it to intensify the innate philistinism of mankind in general. So what follows hard upon the end ...”

“... carpenter’s shop, or that solitariness was not a stimulus for imagination. Indeed, he said to Osbert Sitwell that ‘any talent I may have was due to a long illness as a boy, which afforded me time to think, and to subsequent ill-health, because I was not allowed to play games and so had to teach myself, for my enjoyment, to use my eyes instead of my ...”

“... Arriving​ at his prep school in the bleak winter of 1918 the ten-year-old Osbert Lancaster was made even more miserable than the average new bug by the fact that St Ronan’s, Worthing was a spectacularly sporty school. The headmaster, Stanley Harris, had captained England at football and was also a distinguished cricketer and rugby player ...”

“... for home-front ironists like Henry Reed or look-the-other-way aesthetes like Cyril Connolly or Osbert Sitwell. As it turns out, and this is a paradox that runs throughout the book, his hostility to America’s ‘unironic’ temper, to its earnestness and sentimentality, is of such depth and ferocity that it leads him to over-value almost any piece of ...”

“... statements, but O’Shaughnessy would have been much more pained by one than by the other. Osbert Sitwell, a stout admirer of Gosse, was to insist on ‘the sheer quality of fun which he possessed in the highest degree’. But Sitwell also takes occasion of Gosse’s having to wear a patch over an eye to compare ...”

“... in Norfolk the rule was: HM the Queen and Miss A.C. Henderson alt. Other lay patrons included Sir Osbert Sitwell, Certain Landowners of Colton and two peers who at that time had had eight wives between them. Again, would Wodehouse have dared? It is good news that the man who solved the Tanagra figurine mystery has tracked down the Infant Samuel at ...”

“... woman, a mother of kings, wasted and frustrated because she did not know what next to be at. Sir Osbert Sitwell, a frequent visitor to Badminton, detected many ‘Rumanian traits’ in the Queen (there were family links with Transylvania) and among these were ‘the manner in which she smoked cigarettes; her love of jewels, and the way she wore ...”

“... post-war dissidents and exiles such as Aldous Huxley and Norman Douglas and D.H. Lawrence and Osbert Sitwell to the hot beaches of the Mediterranean and the ‘lakes of light’ in Northern Italy and Mexico. But Haggard was not their kind, and with the exception of a trip to Egypt, after the war he stayed in England, attending his ...”

“... who fleetingly glimpsed the man behind the mask were always puzzled. In Great Morning!, Osbert Sitwell recalled that when Moore ‘had said something that he hoped would appal everyone in the room . . . a seraphic smile would come over his face, and remain on it, imparting to it a kind of illumination of virtue, like a saint’. Despite his ...”

“... confection of gingerbread which ought to be under a glass shade on a giant’s mantlepiece’. Osbert Sitwell, by contrast, thought it a ‘wistful, unique monument of widowhood’, but R.G. Collingwood found it to be ‘visibly misshapen, corrupt, crawling, verminous’. Hermione Gingold, on the other hand, presumably unaware of this swingeing ...”