Edward Charles Sackville-West, 5th Baron Sackville (13 November 1901 – 4 July 1965) was a British music critic, novelist and, in his last years, a member of the House of Lords.

As a critic and a member of the board of the Royal Opera House, he strove to promote the works of young British composers, including Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett.

"[2] At Oxford he made many literary friends, including Maurice Bowra, Roy Harrod and L. P. Hartley, and literature began to rival music as his chief interest.

Its study of a children's nurse was judged "impressive and in its way original, the more so because Simpson has such a cool, aloof quality and so little resembles the conventional Nanny of fact or fiction.

"[6] In this period, away from fiction, Sackville-West wrote A Flame in Sunlight: the Life and Work of Thomas De Quincey (1936), for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

[4][7] In 1935 Sackville-West became music critic of the magazine New Statesman, a post he held for twenty years, contributing weekly reviews of recordings.

He maintained rooms there which are now open to the public, but it was not until 1945 that he had a home of his own, having lived with the art historian Kenneth Clark and his family at Upton near Tetbury.

Along with the literary critic Raymond Mortimer, he established "what in effect was a male salon, entertaining at the weekends a galaxy of friends from the worlds of books and music.

"[1] Guests included E.M. Forster, Benjamin Britten, Nancy Mitford, Graham Greene, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Ben Nicholson.

[3] Shawe-Taylor wrote, "Barely a quarter of an hour before, he had been playing to a friend, who was staying with him, the new record of Britten's Songs from the Chinese performed by Peter Pears and Julian Bream.