Left Hand, Right Hand!

Autobiography #1

by Osbert Sitwell

, 5 volumes including Left Hand, Right Hand!, The Scarlet Tree (1st ed), Great Morning, Laughter in the Next Room (1st ed), and Noble Essences (1st ed), complete with black and white illustrations, illustrated endpapers

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Memoir

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1943

About the author

Sir Francis Osbert Sacheverell Sitwell, Bt.

Reviews

[Chris Espe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book actually explains how the world is full of asymmetry, even though we trick ourselves into seeing things as symmetrical, like faces, bodies, etc. It also talks about how handedness evolved in human beings. If you like reading books that talk about the influence of silia on human evolution, then this is the book for you.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult for me to add much as a reviewer but it is a fascinating glimpse into an aristocratic family and the Victorian-era childhood of Sir Osbert Sitwell. For a reader in 2020, the high style of the writing can be almost as challenging as Shakespearian verse to move through. Long, meandering sentences with colons, semi-colons, dashes, and ellipses, and loaded with vocabulary so rich, you might feel like you're coming down with verbal gout. Sir Sitwell is highly perceptive of nature, his family history, and the artistic scene at the time. The final chapter of the book focuses on a family portrait painted by John Singer Sargent. The portrait was a sign of status for the parents but the childhood glimpse of the great artist by a young Osbert and his sister Edith influenced them later in life to become artists in their own write. I'll have to let this one sit for a while before I decide on whether I have the stamina to read the other five volumes. In any case, I'm glad there were writers like Osbert Sitwell with his sensibilities about the world giving us a slice of life that must now sound like an alien world to an audience a little more than a hundred years later.

The inner leaf of this particular edition shows inky hand prints of the author.

[Ramesh Abhiraman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Osbert Sitwell, born in an aristocratic family in Derbyshire before the dawn of the nineteenth century, and who together with his fellow eccentric siblings - elder sister Edith and younger brother Sachaverell became poets, writers and critics, wrote four volumes of his autobiography in 1944-49.
A well known newspaper heralded the series' arrival calling the prose elaborate and precise.
Bringing to vivid detail mores and surroundings of a bygone British generation and its great grandparents, the book js rich in atmosphere.

[Quiera · Rating 4 out of 5]

a great poem need more lol