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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”