WITH AN EYE TO THE FUTURE

The title to the contrary, this is a sequel to his All Done From Memory (1953) and it takes place in a more halcyon past ending with World War II. Once again, that man of all talents (illustrator, stage designer, cartoonist) revamps his youth from the first World War when bombs fell on that ""solid enclave of later Victorian culture,"" and his father was killed on the day he was due back on leave. Lancaster's memoir is spangled with famous names (literary, theatrical, social, etc.) and comments on them en passant; only his mother, with a taste for theosophy and the theatre (and Ethel M. Dell, read secretly) is more personalized. A Charterhouse schooling, the culturally lively years at Oxford, travels, work-freelancing, his marriage (his mother-in-law, with her stress on hygiene and hypochondria, suffered ""from a bidet-fixe"")--all this is touched up with humor and taste in what is essentially a very civilized memento.