He asked us to drop in for tea when we had finished, but to come in by the servants' entrance because he was alone in the house and there was no one to answer the front door (again a characteristic carry-on, suggesting both poverty and solitude but also an unshed grandeur - there appeared to be no question of him answering the door himself).

Somehow we ended up in what was clearly the drawing-room, which seemed empty until our eyes focused enough to see the celebrated gaunt hawk's profile outlined against the long window. Thus discovered - I saw from later encounters this was how he liked to be come upon - he pushed a plate of dry cucumber sandwiches at us and began to talk in a shy undertone.

At first I thought this awkwardness was because he was out of practice in company. His wife, Hester, had long since been turfed out and their only son, George, was away and for the moment estranged, too. But this was Sassoon's normal way of talking (his poetry readings at the height of his fame had often been more or less inaudible), and it was no obstacle to a formidable eloquence when he got going.

[...]

Where Philip does remain memorable is as a figure in the history of taste. Port Lympne, in its dramatic setting overlooking the Channel, can be seen as a landmark in the evolution of the postmodern. Philip originally commissioned Sir Herbert Baker to build an H-shaped house in the Dutch Colonial style. Soon, Elizabethan balustrades were added, later its most memorable feature, a grand triumphal Trojan staircase of Mussolini or Cecil B De Mille proportions, from the top of which you could see France on a clear day. Inside, there was a Moorish courtyard, marble everywhere and extravagant murals by José María Sert, "the Tiepolo of the Ritz".

Philip was fully aware of the high camp nature of the whole enterprise and said of one particularly ghastly bathroom panelled in brown and black zigzags of marble, "It takes you by the throat and shakes you." He delighted in monstrous armies of blue delphiniums, and sickening swirls of herbaceous borders. He was delighted, too, when he heard a guide telling a party of visitors, "It's all in the old-world style but every bit of it sham."

Guardian/LRB essay: Sussing Sassoon. Schöne Geschichte über Siegfried Sassoon und dessen Cousin Philip.