In his critical essay on Osbert Sitwell (1951) Roger Fulford tells of his subject's being disparaged for wasting too much time with the aristocratic society to which, by birth, he belonged. The charge, in short, was that Sitwell was lazy. One of Sitwell's friends, the novelist Arnold Bennett, was present to hear the remark, and after considerable laughter responded, "The truth with Osbert is that he has seven professions, not one, and a life devoted to each." Fulford lists among these professions those of "writer, traveler, politician, pamphleteer, editor, and organizer of picture exhibitions."

Most of Sitwell's essays were written, as he notes in the introduction to the collection Pound Wise (1963), "before the dissolution of the British Empire." The fact is significant, because for good or ill, they all exhibit the ironic attitude of the self-aware imperialist. His nonfiction prose is characterized by extreme worldliness and erudition, by a...