Robert Dudley Best (1892–1984) was a British manufacturer deeply involved with the Modern design movement in and immediately after the interwar years.
He took over Best & Lloyd, his father's light industrial engineering works in Birmingham, having previously trained as a metal designer at art school in Düsseldorf.
He went on to design the Bestlite, an iconic Bauhaus-styled desk lamp that remains in production and was used by Winston Churchill in Whitehall.
Best wrote prolifically, though only one of his books was published in his lifetime: Brass Chandelier, his history of his father's experiments with metal manufacturing and promotion of progressive German pedagogic ideas, which Pevsner reviewed in the Architectural Review.
Best's history of his own early life and that of his younger brother Frank, both of whom served in the First World War, was published posthumously in 2020 as From Bedales to the Boche.