Word: waughs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Loved One is by no means the subtle and cold-blooded rage at the perversion of death and love which some subtle and raging people suppose it to be. It is Evelyn Waugh caught between laughter and vomiting. The story of the patriotic pretensions and fussy snobbishness of the British film colony is grade A Waugh. Less artful is the travelogue of the intricate inanities of Whispering Glades, from the voice of a nightingale piped through the grounds and mortuary buildings to the Lake Isle of Innisfree, complete with nine rows of beans and beeless beehives with electric buzzers (burial...
Perverse Innocence. In 1928, Evelyn (pronounced Evil in) Arthur St. John Waugh (rhymes with raw) leaped, like a literary commando, out of nowhere and, establishing a beachhead in that dismal waste land which Poet T. S. Eliot had charted six years before, began to commit merry mayhem on the comic muse...
...effortless sprint of Waugh's prose discovered a new region of perverse innocence unshadowed by any moral concepts whatever, it was clear that a new master of English satire had emerged...
...perfectly manipulated anarchy of Decline and Fall, at once playful and lethal, was peopled with a rout of sinister caricatures tagged with unforgettable names (Waugh is probably the most inspired creator of synthetic surnames since Charles Dickens). There were Lady Circumference and her numskull son, little Lord Tangent; Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde (later Lady Margot Metroland) and her son, Peter Pastmaster; Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington and Viola Chasm. This glittering, blandly selfish, pretentiously stupid upper-class riffraff was to romp through most of Waugh's later books, sharing their futile power for pointless and appalling mischief with such later...
Bright Young Books. The bright books followed one another like delayed bursts of sinister laughter. "Spotty, a little flat, not quite so good," some readers said. But they were still the funniest books of their kind being written, and Evelyn Waugh was Britain's No. 1 satirical novelist...