Word: osbert
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Died. Sir Osbert Sitwell, 76, fifth baronet, illustrious man of British letters, who with his equally famed sister, Dame Edith, and brother Sacheverell, devoted a lifetime to baiting the established ideas and figures of his age while celebrating the splendor of the past; of a heart at tack; in Montagnana, Italy. "I belonged," he once wrote, "to the prewar era, a proud citizen of the great free world of 1914, in which comity prevailed." Not for him the modern age, in which "the sabre-toothed tiger and the ant are our paragons, and the butterfly is condemned for its wings...
Tall (6 ft. 4 in. by the time he was 15) and myopic, Huxley grew up through Eton and Oxford to live in a thin, rarefied world of his own. His notion of conversation, Osbert Sitwell grumbled, was to relay data on the "incestuous mating of melons" or the "curious amorous habits of cuttlefish." In words that Clark applies to all the Huxleys, young Aldous seemed less a human being than "something more nearly approaching a controlled experiment...
...main interest to the casual reader of his book, which is a must for historians, is in the picture Macmillan gives of the vanishing world of the British aristocracy. It was best described by Osbert Sitwell, a friend and brother Guards officer: "The world was a ripe peach and we were eating it"; or by Rupert Brooke, type and symbol of Britain's doomed youth: "Stands the Church clock at ten to three, / And is there honey still...
Edith and her younger brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell thereupon established a literary cult of three, "the Sit-wells." Edith was its high priestess, and in preparation for the part she fitted herself from head to foot with psychological braces: floor-length gowns cut from upholstery material, turbans and toques and tippets of excited hue, finger rings containing chunks of aquamarine the size of duck eggs. In full regalia, she looked like Lyndon B. Johnson dressed up as Elizabeth...
...escaped to London just before World War I, and, with the help of her gifted brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, soon established a salon in her attic apartment. Her verse ranged from the once avant-garde fun of Facade to social comment in Gold Coast Customs and religious visions in her late work. Poetry, she thought, "springs from the essential nature of things." and she sought essential things fn nature, as with her lines...