Word: osbert
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...least remarkable feature of the volume was that Edith Sitwell should have written it. The oldest member of an industrious literary family that includes Osbert (Before the Bombardment, Miracle on Sinai) and Sacheverell (Doctor Donne and Gargantua, All Slimmer in a Day), she has previously been best known for her calm, highbrow aloofness, her volumes of verse, her idiosyncratic individualism, her interest in famed British eccentrics, her biography of Alexander Pope. Now 49, she is tall (over 6 ft.), blonde, unmarried, with straight classic features. Readers who know her previous books will be surprised at the interest in social conditions...
...BRIGHTON-Osbert Sitwell and Margaret Barton-Houghton Mifflin...
Sharing none of Thackeray's prejudices, Osbert Sitwell and Margaret Barton, in their new history of Brighton, find George IV, while not exactly an ornament to Britain, at least no unmixed Victorian monster. His streak of family insanity "had softened down to a curious, harmless and most effective eccentricity." He was frequently drunk, but no more so than most English aristocrats of that period. His delusions, that he had defeated many butchers and bakers in fistfights, that he had commanded at many a battle, including Waterloo, were merely symptoms of the same madness that had made his old father...
...cost. Although Sitwell and Barton write long and authoritatively on the beauties of the romantic architecture he sponsored, a taint of snobbishness and affectation is discernible in their accounts. Despite Brighton and its patron's love of art, Thackeray was probably more nearly right about George IV than Osbert Sitwell and Margaret Barton...
Beverly Nichols once said of Britain's three writing Sitwells?Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell?that they had genius enough for two. If Sacheverell's latest book does not show the full two-thirds that is his family share, it does reveal him as a conscientious, able biographer who has brought back to life one of music's grandest, most glittering figures?Franz Liszt...