Hugh Gordon Porteus

Hugh Gordon Porteus (1906–93), literary and art critic; literary editor of The Twentieth Century (Promethean Society), 1931–3; advertising copywriter; disciple of Wyndham Lewis; author of Wyndham Lewis: A Discursive Exposition (1932) – supplemented by his essay ‘A Man Apart’ in Agenda (1969–70) – and Background to Chinese Art (F&F, 1935). He was depicted, as ‘Old Porteous’, in Coming up for Air (1939), by George Orwell; and satirised by Wyndham Lewis in Self Condemned (1954) as ‘Rotter’ Parkinson. See obituary in The Times, 20 Feb. 1993; ‘Forgotten man of the Thirties’, TLS, 26 Mar. 1993, 13–14; and Jeffrey Meyers, ch. 5: ‘Hugh Gordon Porteus’, in Resurrections: Authors, Heroes – and a Spy (University of Virginia Press, 2018).