PRESENTATION COPY TO CLARE CONSUELO SHERIDAN : The Friends of England - Lectures to Members of the British Legion

First edition inscribed in November 1923, ‘For Clare Sheridan from Ian Hamilton who wishes very much he had been able to hear her in Russia, Germany and America before he wrote about these lands’. Clare Sheridan (1885–1970) was an English sculptor, journalist and writer, known primarily for creating busts for famous sitters and keeping travel diaries. She moved in the same elite British social and political circles as Sir Ian Hamilton, particularly through their mutual close connection to Winston Churchill. She is known to have sculpted a bust of Sir Ian Hamilton (now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery) which required multiple sittings and direct personal interaction. Traveling widely in Russia she made busts of notable revolutionaries and stayed in the Kremlin for two months where her sculpting subjects included Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Felix Dzerzhinsky and Kamenev. While in Russia, Sheridan is reputed to have had affairs with more than one of her sitters. While visiting America she allegedly had a love affair with Charlie Chaplin and became the roving European correspondent for New York World Newspaper under its editor Herbert Swope. She is described at this time as 'beautiful, intelligent, meddlesome, and man-mad'.

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Publisher’s blue cloth boards in good condition, lower board watermarked, bumped to spine top and tail. Text block square and sound. Front free endpaper inscribed by Sir Ian Hamilton in black ink. Scattered age spotting to preliminaries. Text block clean and unmarked. 256 pp.