Word: alec
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Honorably Ineligible. Home's father was a cheerful, absent-minded nobleman of the Wodehouse breed-the sort that would take potshots at hares from the drawing-room window. At first young Alec seemed to take after him. Eton contemporaries still remember Alec Home's finest hour, in the big cricket match of 1922, when he scored 66 runs on a sticky wicket against Harrow. In those days, Author and Fellow Etonian Cyril Connolly wrote, Britain's new Prime Minister "was the kind of graceful, tolerant, sleepy boy who is showered with favors and crowned with...
...Alec's younger brother, Playwright William Douglas-Home, warns that his "apparent mildness, his good-natured absent-mindedness," even his grin, are deceptive. William also vows that under Home, unlike Macmillan, "there won't be any nepotism." Says he: "Sister Bridget won't be chairing the Tory conference at Blackpool, my bird-watching brother Henry won't be next Secretary of State for Scotland, I will not be sent to the U.N., and Edward, my youngest brother, who spent four years on the Burma railway as a prisoner of war, will not be Minister without Portfolio...
...were not myself," writes Alec Waugh, "and if I were to pick up the autobiography of Alec Waugh, the first name that I should look for in the index would be Evelyn Waugh." Sadly, he would be right. Alec, 65, is a skilled journeyman writer of novels (Island in the Sun) and travel books (Hot Countries), but he has the misfortune of having a younger brother who is a comic genius. Happily, for most of his autobiography he manages to forget that fact and concentrate on his own story-which often reads like an extension of his fiction...
Mild Blighty. Son of a distinguished London publisher, Alec went to his father's school, Sherborne, where he was everything a public-school boy should be: a star batsman at cricket, a fine forward at rugby, a winner of the English verse prize. What changed that Kiplingesque image was a mild flirtation he had with a younger boy. When it was discovered, the experience soured his last months in school but inspired the novel that brought him early fame -The Loom of Youth...
...life also lost a good deal of its glamour. He drifted into and out of an unsuccessful marriage, took a job in publishing, and kept turning out studiously Galsworthian novels. By the early '30s, Evelyn had become by far the more famous of the two writing Waughs. Alec confesses that he has not seen Evelyn "twenty times in the last twenty years," and he has little to say of his brother beyond the fact that he regards him as "incomparably the finest novelist of our period...