Lancaster a été le troisième mari de la journaliste Ann Scott-James. J'ai trouvé sur internet cet article qui est un résumé d'une biographie écrite par Richard Boston , "A Portait of Osbert Lancaster".

Osbert Lancaster was born in 1908, near the end of the Edwardian era, and carried throughout his life the memory of those final, happy days before Europe’s first Armageddon. He was the last of the last of the Edwardians. (His first name, Osbert, is a derivation of Albert, the Christian name of Edward VII.) The young Osbert was an unwilling schoolboy at Charterhouse, where the headmaster’s final report praised him as “irretrievably gauche” and “a sad disappointment.” For Osbert the feeling was mutual: He was already drawing at this time — the officials at Charterhouse coming in for many an illustrated drubbing — and already in the active style full of movement that would mark his future work.
___Armageddon (de l'hébreu : מגידו, signifiant « colline de Megiddo », un petit mont en Israel), terme biblique  mentionné dans le Nouveau Tastament , est un lieu symbolique du combat final entre le Bien et le Mal .

___irretrievable , adj =  Difficult or impossible to retrieve or recover ;

___irretrivably ,adv. =  irréparablement.

___drubbing ,n. = a beating, as with a stick, cudgel ;  the act of inflicting corporal punishment with repeated blows

Osbert’s first move after being admitted to Lincoln College, Oxford, was to grow the distinguished, just-shy-of-Stalinesque mustache that would adorn his upper lip for the rest of his life, and which was quite contrary to the prevailing fashion among the university’s effete young arbiters of taste. His contemporaries at Oxford include a who’s who of 20th-century aesthetes, dandies and literati: Allan Pryce-Jones, Beverly Nichols, Cecil Day-Lewis, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, Randolph Churchill (Winston’s boy, whom Osbert described as “without exception the best-looking man I’ve ever seen”), and Robert Byron.
___just-shy-of- Stalinesque mustache
___mustache that would adorn his upper lip
___prevailing fashion ; prevailing , adj. = Most frequent or common; predominant.
During his college years Osbert primarily ran with the aesthetes as opposed to the games-mad hearties. Yet unlike many of his fellow artistic and literary friends he wasn’t gay. Nor was he attracted, like Waugh and others, to Catholicism. With drawing-room Marxism and other lefty political poses he would have no truck; likewise with the far right. He was uniquely Osbert, and that had already come to mean a balanced mind with a sense of proportion in a modest conservatism.
___games-mad
___hearties , n.pl. = A good fellow; a comrade. hearty , adj. = enthousiaste , chaleureux
___truck  (= dealings) to have no truck with sb = refuser d'avoir affaire à qqn.

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Osbert’s sartorial style also crystallized during the ‘30s. Like many of the more innovative dandies before him, Osbert’s style was decided not only by what he chose wear but what he cast off. “I wear everything I was not allowed to wear at Charterhouse. We were not allowed jackets with vents, shirts with attached collars, or less than three buttons to a jacket,” he once said. “As soon as I left school, I had all my suits made up with two-button jackets.” He claimed to have set the fashion for attached collars and pink shirts. “My shirtmaker was appalled,” he remembered. And he discarded vests — he said that central heating had made them unnecessary — and the boots that his mother insisted “were so good for my ankles”

He was not above a bit of sartorial daring now and then and claimed to be among the first to wear white dinner jackets. It’s probable that Noel Coward was really among the first, but Osbert was no doubt the first among his set and class, which is what counts.

Osbert may have been a shade more casual a dandy than his predecessors — which is also, of course, very like many of his dandy predecessors. But he insisted on certain standards, such as dinner jackets for evening, saying, “I can’t see the point of saying ‘don’t dress, just put on a dark suit.’ If you are going to change, you might as well do it properly.”

Despite the depression, the mid-1930s were good times for the Lancasters, all the way up until the time the Germans invaded Poland.

***

Osbert wasn’t exactly the military type, but he managed to do his part and with considerable aplomb. He joined the Diplomatic Service and was sent to the British Embassy in Athens after British and Greek forces forced the Nazis out, only to be caught in the middle of one of the least pleasant civil wars of the 20th century. Here he worked with Harold Macmillan, among other notables. Caught between the various trigger-happy factions, the embassy was all but used by snipers for target practice. The ricochet of bullets served as accompaniment to each day’s dissonant aria of diplomacy.

After the war, Osbert returned to London and settled into that pattern of life that would continue to make him such a quiet social, creative and commercial success. He continued creating his pocket cartoons, writing and illustrating his own books and illustrating those of his friends. In addition he gave lectures, went often to his tailor (Thresher & Glenny), appeared occasionally on BBC television, traveled to Italy (to see Max Beerbohm), as well as other places, painted murals for commercial buildings, designed costumes and sets for opera, ballet and theatre, and of course kept up with the gossip at his clubs and rarely turned down an invitation to a party. He was knighted in 1975, the only cartoonist ever to be thus honored. He died in 1986, aged 77.

(extrait de l'article paru dans  www.dandyism.net/?p=307 )