Richard Buckle (1916–2001). British dance critic and writer

From an aristocratic background, Richard Buckle was born in Warcop, a village in Cumbria. His father was killed in 1918 during World War One, and Buckle was brought up by his mother and various female relatives. He was educated at Marlborough College, after which he spent a year in Oxford, at Balliol College, and then time at the Heatherly School of Fine Art, where he became interested in ballet.

In 1939 Buckle founded Ballet magazine, which run had to be suspended during the course of World War Two. During the war, Buckle served in the Scots Guards, and was mentioned in dispatches. After the war he resumed work on Ballet until 1952.

Buckle was ballet critic for The Observer from 1948 until 1955, and became the highly influential dance critic for the Sunday Times in 1959. He organised several exhibitions, including the famous Diaghilev Exhibition at the Edinburgh International Festival in 1954, and was a driving force behind the establishment of The Theatre Museum (now a department of the Victoria and Albert Museum), for which he collected a great many costumes worn for productions by the Ballets Russes.

Richard Buckle also wrote well-received biographies of Vaslav Nijinsky (1971) and Serge Diaghilev (1979), as well as editing the autobiography of Lydia Sokolova and the diaries of Cecil Beaton. Buckle was appointed CBE in 1979. Buckle was well known for his wit, as well as for his asperity as a critic, most notoriously in his devastating review of Frederick Ashton’s Tiresias in 1951, which was held by some to contribute to the death of the composer Constant Lambert three weeks later. In his later years Buckle suffered from ill health and retired to an isolated cottage in Wiltshire.