Search Results

“... 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 ...”

“... appearances and offers descriptions an illustrator can build on. The paperback covers drawn by Osbert Lancaster for the early Dance volumes, and those done later by Mark Boxer for the whole series when they were reissued by Fontana, are rare examples in modern English fiction of illustrations which add to the understanding of a novel rather than ...”

“... frying-pan into the fire: still a despised European. It made things worse that he detested abroad; Osbert Lancaster said that Betjeman abroad had to be surrounded by friends, like a rugby player who has lost his shorts. He also disliked Betjemann, who, though a man of parts, was at times quarrelsome and censorious. Mr Hillier’s book is stuffed with ...”

“... had paperback rights to Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, the covers used drawings by Osbert Lancaster. Later, when Powell moved publishers, there were drawings by Marc Boxer. Lancaster’s are less intrusive because they show places as much as people. Boxer’s comic impersonations put his idea of the ...”

“... In pocket cartoons he was bright but perhaps never quite the equal of the doyen of the genre, Osbert Lancaster. Among the ‘portraits’ or caricatures, of which we are offered well over a hundred, there are many brilliant successes and few failures. The editor has forsworn annotation, but has instead chosen figures still not in too rapid recession ...”

“... crystallised by the people than in the travelogue prose. The Freetown Governor and his wife (‘if Osbert Lancaster had been delegated by God to design them, they could not have been more precisely what they sounded like’), or an Etonian in Dominica who had married his black cook (‘a most depraved-looking middle-aged man, straight out of Maugham, with ...”

“... tour de force is also a sober labour of love. This Waugh has affiliations with Richard Boston’s Osbert Lancaster, the portrait of a connoisseur of social oddity who also loved it steadily and whole. Boston is discriminatingly informative about Lancaster’s achievement as artist and cartoonist, and about such ...”

“... environment that would have been recognisable as that of a liberal, left-wing intellectual. Osbert Lancaster could have put the decor into a Hampstead Garden Suburb drawing-room. The bedroom suite, the dining-room furniture and my father’s desk were copied by a local cabinetmaker from a Heal’s catalogue. The red spines of the Left Book Club ...”

“... of the scholar and controversialist, who taught classics at Charterhouse, was once seen by Osbert Lancaster accompanying Lady Asquith down Bond St, and died a Companion of Honour and a trustee of the Reform Club. Page was an admirable Latinist, independent, commonsensical, and sharply aware of a world outside books. Even when wrong, he was ...”

“... of Mon Repos and Erzanmine and sunburst garden gates, the endless lines of ‘Tudor bypass’, as Osbert Lancaster called it, broken only by pinched shops spatchcocked into parades and esplanades. In contrast, the publicity photographs of Metroland showed tree-sheltered homesteads of ineffable distinction, sometimes with thatched roofs, and ponds and ...”

“... still flourished, a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace. It was this establishment, now Lancaster House, which so impressed Queen Victoria that she said to the second duchess: ‘I come from my house to your palace.’ The London Rich has much useful information on the nature of leases, the complications of which often throttled the aspirations of ...”

“... in a Conrad essay the study ‘of human nature at close range’. And in another, speaking of Osbert Lancaster, he names ‘temperament’ as ‘the overriding element in any artist’. For all his evident if reticent romanticism, Powell is absorbed by the literary as a study of human life – a concept that goes straight back to the 18th ...”

“... but his drawing is both fussy and crude. Gerald Scarfe is essentially a caricaturist; Marc and Osbert Lancaster are purveyors of one-line gags. The only comparison is with Vicky; he very nearly reaches Low’s level of political acuity and wit but his drawings are much slighter and his characterisation thinner than Low’s. Rowlandson and Gillray ...”

“... Betjeman’s horizons, leading him and Elizabeth Cavendish regularly abroad in a group that Osbert Lancaster (one of Betjeman’s most steadfast friends) christened ‘the Church of England Ramblers Association’. Betjeman’s hate figures could not be counted as enemies, since many of them were oblivious of their importance to him. Some, such as ...”

“... and takes us back into a world of British upper-class twits familiar from Evelyn Waugh, Osbert Lancaster and P. G. Wodehouse – at times, it reads almost like ‘Bertie Wooster goes to Russia.’ The typical British army officer seconded to Russia after the war was a product of prep and public schools and Sandhurst, captured by Reid as ...”