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“... An exhibition of Osbert Lancaster’s drawings, cartoons, illustrations and set and costume designs, selected by James Knox, will begin at the Wallace Collection on 2 October. Lancaster was a short man with a big head, strikingly large blue eyes, a curled moustache and a dandy’s taste for very good, but emphatic clothes (pink shirts, bow ties ...”

“... birth, education and marriage, most of its main contributors are respectably upper-middle-class (Osbert Lancaster recently dubbed Ingrams ‘a terrible snob’); it was founded with private money, and now, like other flourishing firms, boasts a pension scheme and a company villa in the Dordogne. Secondly, as Patrick Marnham demonstrates in the course of ...”

“... she had a turbulent marriage until his suicide in 1948. Joan Leigh Fermor, a former secretary to Osbert Lancaster, was the wife of Patrick Leigh Fermor, famous at that time for his activities during the war, including the controversial kidnapping of the German commander on Crete. The third was Barbara Hutchinson, whose mother, Mary, a cousin of Lytton ...”

“... pedigree sported a familiar range of lordly personalities. Like a row of cartoon portraits by Osbert Lancaster she runs us through them. The first earl was the clever one, a Whig who got the title, the second was the cultured earl, who lived in Italy and commissioned busts of his daughters from Thorvaldsen. The inevitable spendthrift earl was the ...”

“... was tense as Greece moved towards civil war, but society was lively. Among his compatriots were Osbert Lancaster, Rex Warner and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Maurice Cardiff, the army officer who ran the council temporarily before Runciman arrived, recalls him vividly dealing with his improbable staff as they all gamely muddled through. ‘He had two kinds of ...”

“... loathed everything high-Victorian. The few who didn’t – the usual crew of Betjeman, Waugh, Lancaster, a Mitford or two and even Kenneth Clark – were regarded as frivolous self-advertisers playing at perversity. What had been a far from straightforward face-off between propagandists for diverse forms of classicism and, on the other side, god’s own ...”

“... The personnel sounds like a dream roster, an all-time heavenly cricket team. Greene on cinema, Osbert Lancaster on art, Elizabeth Bowen on theatre, William Empson on travel ... and Evelyn Waugh on books. Waugh’s lambasting of the milquetoast Left sounds like mere common sense now, but by making truthfulness of prose his first criterion he achieved a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... were guests of Astor’s, other visitors included the president of Pakistan, Lord Mountbatten and Osbert Lancaster. Did Ward throw Keeler Profumo’s way? Did Ivanov know? Was it a honey-trap? Whatever the answers to these questions, it is unlikely Astor had much idea of what was going on. He was something of an innocent, trying to emulate his mother ...”

“... as an early sign of the triumph of rational design which would follow. Art Deco reproduces two of Osbert Lancaster’s illustrations of 1939 from Homes Sweet Homes, ‘Functionalist interior’ and ‘Modernistic interior’, and says of them that ‘in this context both the Moderne and the Modernistic are viewed as vulgar and ...”

“... 1929: Cimmie became MP for Stoke on Trent and Mosley was given the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster with responsibility (under J.H. Thomas) for unemployment. A year later he resigned his ministerial post, and in January 1931, he and Cimmie resigned from the Labour Party. The first resignation was a triumph: the second ruined his career. At the time of ...”