Word: osbert
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...other residents to build a wall, with a gate, around their development. The author, mistrusting his skill and the reader's acuteness, relentlessly flashes irony alerts. Candido gets work constructing the wall, knowing well enough whom it is intended to keep out. Coyotes eat the nature writer's lapdogs, Osbert and Sacheverell. And when a mud slide sweeps Delaney toward mucky death, let there be no doubt whose brown, work-worn hand reaches to pull him free. This is weak, obvious stuff, worth a raised eyebrow and a shrug...
...1930s but belonged to none of them. He was "a passionately self-isolating figure . . . highly individual, combining expected elements of the European mainstream with personal tastes that can appear willful or mandatory." He was also a witty and truthful art critic, whose essays and journalism, collected in 1947 by Osbert Sitwell under the title A Free House!, are never dull and often possess a Shavian energy. Courageous to the point of eccentricity, Sickert always followed his own nose...
...title role is taken by an animal thought to be extinct by the Zenkalis, an innocent and exploitable people. Their belief is shared by a young Briton, Peter Foxglove, sent to the island by his venal uncle, Sir Osbert, in order to pave the way for a military port and airstrip. But in classic anticolonial style, he crosses over to side with the natives. Peter's conversion is aided by a cast variegated in color and comedy: a king built on the order of a mahogany tree; his impudent adviser Hannibal, who addresses his majesty as Kingy; the irreverent...
Hope, in Emily Dickinson's dictum, is the thing with feathers, and so it develops on Zenkali. If Osbert gets his way, the Mockery Bird really will die out, and with it the island. For, in a chain of interdependence as outlandish as nature itself, the Mockeries feed on the fruit of the Ombu tree, remove its outer layer and allow the seed to germinate. The tree grows, plays host to a moth that fertilizes the Amela tree-upon which the island's economy depends. Will the London plutocrats get their way? Will Zenkali perish? Will Peter entice...
...Leavis once remarked, "The Sitwells belong to the history of publicity, rather than that of poetry." He was accurate, but incomplete: to be a Sitwell was also to elevate self-dramatization to the state of an art. Edith Sitwell made the case for herself and her younger brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, with no trace of corrupting modesty: "We all have the remote air of a legend...