Born in Warcop, Westmorland, Britain, as Christopher Richard Sandford Buckle. His mother was R. E. Buckle (née Sandford), and his father, C. G. Buckle, was a Lieutenant-Colonel in the army and was killed in 1918 when Richard Buckle was two. He went to Marlborough College. He then went to Balliol College at Oxford University to study modern languages. However, he failed to obtain a scholarship and left after the first year. He was then sent to Heatherley's Art School.

He was drawn to the theatre and auditioned with Michel St Denis but failed. He then studied textile design at the Polytechnic and went to Paris where he tried haute couture. In 1933 he was at Liverpool Street station, London, and found a copy of Romola Nijinsky's biography of her husband Vaslav Nijinsky and he knew that he wanted to take up theatrical design as a career.

In 1939 he started the periodical Ballet but it had to cease after two issues because of the Second World War. He was an officer in the Scots Guards from 1940 to 1946, and during the War and he was in action in the Western Desert and the Italian Campaign. He was mentioned in dispatches in 1944. After he was demobbed in March 1946 he restarted Ballet, but it was forced to close in 1952 because of increasing costs and competition. From 1948 to 1955 he was the ballet critic for The Observer. In 1959 he went to The Sunday Times to replace Cyril Beaumont, and stayed there for 16 years.

He was very open about his homosexuality at a time when it was a crime. In his autobiography The Adventures of a Ballet Critic, (1953), he describes his gay encounters. However, he went too far for Lincoln Kirstein when he wrote about how they went on a gay pub-crawl and Lincoln Kirstein ending up locked in Richard Buckle's bathroom. He also wrote several plays, and two of them were produced outside London, one with Roger Moore playing a butler. In 1953 Gossip Column was produced at the Q Theatre, and in 1956 Family Tree was produced at the Connaught Theatre, Worthing.

From 1954 to 1964 he designed a long series of exhibitions, involving people such as Cecil Beaton, David Hockney, Leonard Rosoman, Nicholas Georgiadis, and many others. In 1954 he designed an exhibition to mark the 25 years after Diaghilev's death and it was put on at the Edinburgh Festival before transferring for a long run at Forbes House in London. His book In Search of Diaghilev describes the preparation for this exhibition. However, his 1963 exhibition in Stratford-upon-Avon celebrating the 400th. anniversary of William Shakespeare's birth was thought by some to be over ambitious and extravagant.

In 1962 he advised the Canada Council on the state of ballet in Canada. From 1967 yo 1969 he advised Sotheby & Co. on the sale of Sergio Diaghilev material. In 1967 he began to work to create a museum of the performing arts, and he was instrumental in the purchase from the sale of the remaining Diaghilev scenery the Picasso backcloth to the ballet Le Train Bleu. In 1973 the project merged with the old British Theatre Museum under the aegis of the Victoria & Albert museum and became the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden.

Richard Buckle's contribution to dance criticism was significant during a period when modern ballet style was emerging. He praised the Russian style which used the whole body and contrasted it unfavourably with the British style. He could be brutal and his criticism of the July 1951 production of the ballet Tiresias by the choreographer Frederick Ashton and composer Constant Lambert was particularly resented. However, his writing became uneven as drink got the better of him.

His health deteriorated and he had mental breakdowns in 1971 and 1976, and he had a heart attack in 1979. He also broke bones from falls. In 1976 he left London and settled in Wiltshire where he continued to write, and he produced two more autobiographies. He was appointed a CBE in 1979. He died in Salisbury, Wiltshire, Britain.