Beige cloth binding with red title plate and gilt title on the spine.

We provide an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

Note: This book carries the £5.00 discount to those that subscribe to the F.B.A. mailing list.

This is a first edition copy of the second volume of Sir Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography. This book is a solid but not spectacular rendition, regarded as one of the wonder-works of the twentieth-century” (John Russell, ‘The Sunday Times).

Sir Francis Osbert Sacheverell Sitwell, 5th Baronet CH CBE (6 December 1892 – 4 May 1969) was an English writer. His elder sister was Edith Sitwell and his younger brother was Sacheverell Sitwell. Like them, he devoted his life to art and literature.

Sitwell was a close friend of the Duke and Duchess of York, future King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. In December 1936, when the abdication of King Edward VIII was announced, he wrote a poem, Rat Week, attacking principally the former king and Wallis Simpson but also those friends of Edward who deserted him when his alliance with Simpson became common knowledge in England. Because of its libellous content it was not published but Sitwell ensured that it was circulated privately. In February 1937, a version appeared in Cavalcade, which Sitwell described as a “paper, which confounded liveliness with mischief”. The Cavalcade version omitted the “offensive” references to Edward and Wallis. This resulted in the poem gaining an unwarranted reputation as being sympathetic to the Windsors over the way some of their friends had treated them. Cavalcade also missed out a verse in which a number of the “rats” were named explicitly, as to publish this would have been libellous.