Poems and prose remains, with a selection from his letters and a memoir

Firbank remains even today near the top of the essential reading list of every well-read literary queen. He was a great favourite of ‘better’ writers like Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and his writing exemplifies par excellence that style of poisonous, luxuriant prose that Cyril Connolly defined as the Mandarin. As E. M. Forster wrote of him and his louche created world of birettas, lace-stays and pomanders, ‘Is he affected? Yes always… Is he himself healthy? Perish the thought!’ A little older, but longer-lived than either, was Norman Douglas, the third of the Uppingham triumvirate, and at one time a kind of literary and social hero to me and a writer whose first editions I still collect to this day. Here is something that Douglas wrote about Uppingham in his 1933 memoir Looking Back. A mildewy scriptural odour pervaded the institution – it reeked of Jereboam and Jesus; the masters struck me as supercilious humbugs; the food was so vile that for the first day or two after returning from holidays I could not get it down ...»