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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”