Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster, introduced and selected by James Knox
It is a cliché of book-reviewing to write, of a humorous book, ‘I began reading it on a train. It made me laugh out loud several times, to my embarrassment in the crowded carriage.’ Well, it happened to me recently with In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Charlotte Mosley.
What started me off were Leigh Fermor’s variations on William Blake’s couplet:
A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage.
Leigh Fermor’s first conceit made me cackle:
Blackbirds fluttering from a pie
Cause four-and-twenty cheers on high.
His next:
When a pig wanders from its pound
The angels call for drinks all round.
He goes on to record angels’ delight over emancipated bed bugs, moles, moths, rodents, weevils and death-watch beetles. By the end I was, to sustain the cliché, a gibbering wreck. Osbert Lancaster’s humour was rather like that — sending up the over-the-top, pricking the pretentious. Blake’s indignation, though justified, was that little bit soupy.
At the age of 11, in 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain, I was taken to Pineapple Poll, the ballet designed by Lancaster, and to the Battersea Pleasure Gardens, designed by him and John Piper. I quoted him copiously in my 1968 book on Art Deco. (Thanking me for a copy, he wrote: ‘Now I shall be able to hold my head high alongside Pevsner.’) I reviewed Richard Boston’s biography of him for this magazine. I wrote the entry for him for The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. And this year I was asked to write a piece on ‘The Osbert Lancaster I knew’ for Cornerstone, the magazine of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.
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