Henry Talbot de Vere Clifton (16 December 1907 – 26 November 1979) was an eccentric, British aristocrat, poet, race horse owner, art collector and film producer.

[2] He was born on 16 December 1907, the son of John Talbot Clifton and Violet Mary Beauclerk, from a very wealthy family with extensive estates and other property holdings in England and Scotland.

He knew the novelist Evelyn Waugh, having possibly met him at Oxford, and who is thought by some to have used him as a model for the Brideshead Revisited character, Sebastian Flyte,[3] although other sources (e.g. Paula Byrne) attribute the inspiration to Hugh Lygon.

[4] When his father died in 1928 Clifton became the owner of 8,000 acres of prime farmland and Lytham Hall in Lancashire, 16,000 acres of moorland and a house called Kildalton Castle on the isle of Islay in Scotland and all the ground rents of the town of Lytham St Annes in Lancashire.

He told the story of Clifton, believing in a deity he called "the White Goddess" and dining with her at the Ritz once a fortnight.

A meal was served for two and Clifton talked happily to himself for hours or at least "the White Goddess" did not make herself visible to the waiters and diners.

[13] In 1963, he financed the Circlorama cinema (which used the Circular Kinopanorama process) near Piccadilly Circus in London, and requested that the filmmakers make a film with some hobgoblins in it, but the ensuing film, Circlorama Cavalcade, instead featured circus lions, Formula Two cars, ice skaters, trains at Clapham Junction and The Swinging Blue Jeans.

The Spectator described it as "expressing in a sort of prophetic certitude opinions upon religion, patriotism, love, art, war and peace, which he puts in unconventional verse".

The reviewer stated that the book was "the product of a curious, whimsical mind, full of energy, squandering it on half-digested ideas".

Many of his projects were started with great enthusiasm but he quickly lost interest and dropped them, these included the construction of a zoo and plans for a new town on his Lancashire estate.