Word: waughs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Waugh's comrades-in-arms were not favorably impressed by his nonchalance: they expected him to draw enemy bombs. His good friend and commanding officer Major Randolph Churchill (an old-style aristocrat who now writes a column for United Feature Syndicate) cried something to the effect that this was not the Battle of Agincourt. Waugh forsook his lonely eminence, in icy rage removed his coat. "It was not your rudeness I minded," he explained to Major Churchill, "it was your cowardice that surprised...
Brideshead Revisited is a by-product of Waugh's military career. He wrote the 351-page novel while nursing a foot broken in a parachute jump. To many U.S. readers this book will be their first exposure to one of the wittiest, most corrosively mocking and violently serious minds now writing English prose-a mind whose career is almost as exciting as the books it has produced...
...Author. At 24, Evelyn Waugh proclaimed his unflagging aversion to 20th Century technological civilization in a learned, nostalgic study of those 19th Century enemies of technology, the Pre-Raphaelites (Rossetti: His Life and Works). His dislike of the modern world and his satiric discernment of the kind of people who run and ruin it became grim in Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, two wickedly witty and iridescent novels which skewered a refined rogues' gallery of Mayfair cads and bounders. Most critics found these novels much too funny to be taken seriously. But in 1930, Waugh astonished London...
...Author Waugh lives in an old Gloucestershire manor house with his (second) wife, and four children whom he affects to detest. He is a connoisseur of wines and cigars, wears a bowler, takes the air swinging an old-fashioned cane. He cannot drive a car, shuns the telephone, barely accepts a telegram. Sighs his go-ahead friend Randolph Churchill: "He becomes more old-fashioned . . . every day. His favorite novelist is Trollope. . . . He seeks to live in an oasis...
...Novel. Brideshead Revisited is a tragicomedy of Britain between World Wars I & II. Like its author's life, it opens with mockery, ends in religious dedication. Half of it glitters with wit, the other half is rigorously solemn. Some of the writing matches Waugh's best (and there is little better); some of it is equal to his worst (sample: ". . . at sunset I took formal possession of her as her lover. ... On the rough water ... I was made free of her narrow loins."). Those who believe that Author Waugh makes real sense only when he is writing apparent...