Word: osbert
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...believed in 1911 (so Sir Osbert was given to understand) that in the coming war the Horse would come into its own. But Sir Osbert loathed horses, especially the one he had to ride. "When the Commanding Officer used to send for me, as he often did-and, I may add, with no view to congratulating me on my efforts-this agile and vindictive beast would often set off towards him at the fastest gallop, meanwhile, by one of his tricks, causing me to measure my length in the intervening wastes of snow and sand, and there abandoning me, would...
GREAT MORNING (360pp.)-Sir Osbert Sifwell-Little, Brown...
...Osbert Sitwell, who will be 55 in December, is now on Volume III of a five-volume autobiography. He writes with the assurance that, whatever may happen to English aristocracy, the cadences of his prose are not likely to perish sooner than those of Walter Savage Landor or Sir Thomas Browne. Great Morning is a tribute from the worldliest of the artistic Sitwells to the most Arcadian period that any Englishman can remember: the last years of the peace that ended in August...
...Osbert's previous volumes Left Hand, Right Hand and The Scarlet Tree, the dark patches in the tapestry are family matters: the confused tyrannies of the writer's puttering father, the rages and tragic secrecies of his Plantagenet mother. Sir Osbert himself was 19 in 1911, free at last from Eton, but not free from Sir George Sitwell's fuzzy determination to make him a cavalryman. One gentle burlesque that makes this book vivid is Sir Osbert's memory of cavalry training at Aldershot...
Tower Duty. Eventually, Sir Osbert persuaded his father to let him give up horsemanship; he entered the Grenadier Guards. Great Morning is dedicated to one of Sir Osbert's friends and contemporaries in the Guards, then "a charming and elegant young man," now Field Marshal Viscount Alexander of Tunis (and Canada's Governor General). Most of his other Guardsman friends were dead before 1916. Happily stationed in London, resplendently uniformed and detailed to duty at the romantic Tower or at Buckingham Palace, young Sitwell in his free evenings discovered the world of fashion. Heady excitements were...