Word: waughs
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...mystery, furthermore, is a disastrously frayed cliché. But the Brand strength lies in a vivid setting and amusing characters. Her setting in this case-an independent kingdom on an island in the Mediterranean-is as believable and as funny as something invented by the early Evelyn Waugh. Her mixed bag of English people on a conducted tour includes an aging Scotland Yard inspector, a frightened spinster, a fluttery male dressmaker, a seductive female novelist. They can all be remembered for several days after the book is finished-a neat trick for a whodunit...
Captain Trimmer is just one of the odd fish that Evelyn Waugh takes whenever he lets down his nets. This novel is chiefly about officers who have always been gentlemen, particularly that "Christian gentleman,'' Guy Crouchback. It is every bit as good as Men at Arms, whose splendid characterizations and fine writing led many in 1952 to predict that its author had begun the best English fictional account of World War II. Waugh writes of the life and death of ruling-class commandomen with the authority of one who took part in raids on Bardia in Libya...
...other embattled Britons, the winter of 1940 may have been their finest hour-but not for Commando Officers and Gentlemen Evelyn Waugh writes about in his second novel about World War II. With his elite brigades buried in Eastern Mediterranean retreat, the boss commandoman in London could count for instant offensive action exactly six men and a pariah captain left at home in a shipping snafu. Desperate for any justifying achievement, the general ordered out these seven, with his press officer, on a radar-smashing raid by submarine on a Channel islet...
...Waugh explains it, Men at Arms and Officers and Gentlemen, covering the period of the Russo-German alliance, "constitute a whole." He has therefore scrapped his original plan for a trilogy to let these two books stand by themselves, though he plans to "follow the fortunes of the characters through the whole of their war" in later novels. Men at Arms began with Crouchback reading of the Russo-German alliance and rushing in "jubilation" to join a correct, old-line regiment. "A decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason, when the Enemy was plain in view...
...that his fellow aristocrat-that faultlessly bred International Equestrian Champion Ivor Claire, whom he had once thought of as "quintessential England"-had funked and fled his command. This, in the relentless author of A Handful of Dust and The Loved One, is something new. In the evolution of Evelyn Waugh, mercy appears to have arrived to season justice...