Word: waughs
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Trumpets from the Steep, by Diana Cooper. Lady Diana has the delightful ability to make real people seem like Waugh characters, but there is a touch of sadness to the third volume of her autobiography, in which the brightest of the Bright Young People of the '20s says goodbye to her generation...
Trumpets from the Steep, by Diana Cooper. Lady Diana has the delightful ability to make real people seem like Waugh characters, but there is a touch of sadness to the third volume of her autobiography, in which the brightest of the Bright Young People of the '20s say goodbye to her generation...
Lady Diana has a curious way of making real people seem like Waugh characters,* as she does in the cinematic glimpse of life in the Viceregal Lodge at Simla, where the "brontosaurian" viceroy, the Marquess of Linlithgow, maintained a dur-barlike protocol in the last days of the British raj. The edge was taken off the formality by the sight of His Excellency sidling about the vast building clutching his "catty" (catapult) for shooting crows on the rooftop...
...What Waugh offers in his current jottings of his African jaunt, mainly in Kenya, Tanganyika and the Rhodesias, is really a novelist's notebook, full of swiftly sketched scenes and characters who. not surprisingly, speak like people in Waugh fiction. There are astute little studies of key figures in African history, including Cecil Rhodes, an empire builder for whose financial chicanery and ''Anglo-Saxon'' racialism Waugh expresses intense distaste, and the tragic Lobengula, last king of the Matabele. for whom he has intense admiration. And there is a truly Waugh-like figure. "Bishop" Homer...
Zanier than Azania. As usual, Waugh is his own best character, full of a fascinating collection of human quirks, crotchets and quaverings. The most notable and characteristic scene in the book is the one where Tourist Waugh is induced to address a secretarial class at a Tanganyika commercial school on the subject of how to write English. Reports Waugh: "Like a P. G. Wodehouse hero I gazed desperately at the rows of dark, curious faces. 'Well.' I said. 'well. I have spent fifty-four years trying to learn English and I find I still have recourse...