Sir Philip Albert Gustave David Sassoon, 3rd Baronet (4 December 1888 – 3 June 1939) was a British politician and aristocrat.

When aged only nineteen years old his great-grandfather, James Rothschild was sent to Paris to set up the family business in France.

The family eventually established a Head Office at 12, Leadenhall Street, London and a company branch in Manchester.

He spoke with a clipped sibilant lisp, and liked to relax in a blue silk smoking jacket with slippers of zebra hide.

He had fickle, moody fascinations with young men with whom he soon grew bored, but was loyally appreciative of female friends and kept an inner court of elderly, cultivated, ironical bachelors.

His restlessness and fatalism, which were notorious among his friends, killed him at the age of 50 in 1939: although his physicians ordered bed rest after a viral infection, he hurtled about in unnecessary gaieties until his body was beyond recovery.Sassoon served as private secretary to Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig during the First World War from 1915 to 1918.

Because of his "numerous social and political connections", Sassoon, at that time a second lieutenant in the Royal East Kent Yeomanry, was in attendance.

Although he owned a house at Park Lane, Sassoon arranged for Herbert Baker to design another home for him in 1912, Port Lympne in Kent.

"It was a unique building, Italianate and Moorish in its influence, built for a voluptuary of the senses who wanted his rooms to be a rapturous medley of strong, exotic colours and filled with the luscious fragrance of flowers.

[4] He also owned Trent Park and hired Philip Tilden to largely rebuild that mansion located in Cockfosters.

Trent Park possessed a landscape designed by Humphrey Repton but the existing house was Victorian and undistinguished.

[6] It became one of the houses of the age according to one report, "a dream of another world – the white-coated footmen serving endless courses of rich but delicious food, the Duke of York coming in from golf... Winston Churchill arguing over the teacups with George Bernard Shaw, Lord Balfour dozing in an armchair, Rex Whistler absorbed in his painting... while Philip himself flitted from group to group, an alert, watchful, influential but unobtrusive stage director – all set against a background of mingled luxury, simplicity and informality, brilliantly contrived..."[7] This atmosphere, as Clive Aslet has suggested, represented a complete about-face from Sassoon's earlier extravagance at Port Lympne to what Aslet called "an appreciation of English reserve.

"[9] Sassoon conducted excavations of Camlet Moat at Trent Park in the 1920s and was reported to have found oak beams which formed the basis of a drawbridge, Roman shoes and daggers as well as mosaic tiles depicting a knight mounted on a white horse.

His Ballets Russes-inspired dining room at Port Lympne with its lapis walls, opalescent ceiling, gilt-winged chairs with jade-green cushions, all surmounted by a frieze of scantily-clad Africans, suggests the outsider confidence of a Rothschild and of an openly gay man.

[8] Philip Tilden added a bachelor's wing with Moorish courtyard, which Lady Honor Channon, (wife of Chips), unkindly likened to a Spanish brothel,[8] to accommodate young airmen from nearby Romney Marsh flying field – among his other enthusiasms, Sir Philip was himself an aviator – and Tilden's twin swimming pools and monumentally classical garden staircase were in much the same theatrical spirit.

In 1932 he was enthusiastic about the new Percival Gull monoplane and ordered his own model powered by a Napier Javelin 111 six cylinder engine, with the interior finished in red leather.

In this luxurious Gull Four G-ACGR (currently on display at the Brussels Military Museum) he competed in the King’s Cup and the Folkestone Aero Trophy Race.

[2] On 7 October 1919, it was announced that Sassoon had been awarded the French Croix de Guerre "for distinguished services rendered during the course of the campaign".

); France, a decoration of a Knight of the Legion d’Honneur, a decoration of a Knight of the French Colonial Order of the Black Star; Belgium, Officer of the Order of the Crown; French Croix de Guerre and Belgian Croix de Guerre; mounted in the court style.

He was Chairman of the Trustees of the National Gallery from 1933 to 1935, and as Minister for Works in the 1930s he was responsible for embellishing many of London's monuments and parks.

As a collector Philip Sassoon was, like many of the Rothschilds, drawn mainly to the English and French 18th century, but he also collected contemporary artists such as John Singer Sargent and William Orpen.

[15] A Mamuluk glass mosque lamp, once belonging to Sassoon can be found in the collection of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, Portugal.

The reviewer adds, "despite his many gay and bisexual friends, away from 'bohemian circles' it was still a taboo subject (homosexual acts were illegal).