Osbert Sitwell

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A wonderfully witty, major new biography of the renowned poet, novelist, essayist and legendary twentieth-century eccentric, from the best-selling author of Mountbatten and King Edward VIII. The Sitwells—Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell—were the enfants terribles of the 1920s; outflanked in the 1930s by the politically conscious generation of Auden, Isherwood and Spender; then resurgent after World War II, when Osbert's autobiography, Left Hand, Right Hand!, achieved critical and commercial success and he and Edith took the United States by storm. At the heart of every literary fracas from 1918 until well after 1945, Osbert was a close friend and sometime sparring partner of T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh and Cyril Connolly, and a ferocious enemy of Noël Coward, the Leavises and Winston Churchill. His love life was notoriously turbulent; he could be outrageous, perverse, arrogant, bullying; he could be generous, loyal, considerate, public-spirited—but he was never dull. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this entertaining biography provides extraordinary social insights, a striking overview of literary Britain in this century and, above all, a moving portrait of a remarkable human being.