Volume 26, Number 6 · April 19, 1979
The Sitwell Show
By John Richardson
The Sitwells
by John Pearson
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 534 pp., $15.00
What does the Sitwell family have in common with Ian Fleming, the Kray Twins, and Biggles?[*] The same biographer. And, come to think of it, why not? All he had learned about ballyhoo, buggery, and bravado must have stood John Pearson in good stead when he came to assess the public splendors and private miseries of the Sitwells, not to speak of their lifelong feuds. Likewise Pearson's exposure to the personality cult of this aristocratic literary trinity—Osbert, the urbane father figure, Sacheverell, the mercurial younger brother, and Edith, the poetic spirit—will certainly be of help in his next task, a biography of the world's richest, most prolific novelist: that ancient Queen of Hokum, Barbara Cartland.
Review, 6901 words
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