Buckle, Richard
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1916-2001) UK music critic who specialized in ballet, and author of a fantasticated Utopia, John Innocent at Oxford: A Fantasy (1939), which depicts a late-twentieth-century Oxford (and hence Britain) as though Max Beerbohm or Ronald Firbank had dreamed it – extravagant, witty, class-obsessed, boneless – all hilariously rendered. It may well be the last "irresponsible" pastoral utopia published before World War Two put an end to any such mild-mannered vision of Decadence; it would not be until the "Edwardian sf" of Michael Moorcock, which views this dream of Britain in nostalgic hindsight, that vestiges of the mode would reappear in the literatures of the fantastic. [JC]
Christopher Richard Sandford Buckle
born Warcop, Westmorland: 2 August 1916
died Salisbury, Wiltshire: 12 October 2001
works
- John Innocent at Oxford: A Fantasy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1939) [illus/hb/Richard Buckle]
links
previous versions of this entry