Word: waughs
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They are ghosts indeed, weird and touching ones. They have walked the earth ever since Waugh's famed Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, symbols of a hypercivilized, degenerate England. Put Out More Flags -perhaps their last appearance-is Waugh's peculiar genius at its best. In 300 swift, compact pages he constructs not only the funniest but also the most cruelly searching image to date of England in her latest fateful moment of history...
...Waugh's hero ghost is ratlike, inexorably likable Basil Seal, the flower of British adventurousness degraded to magenta.* War draws him and his fellow ghosts into one of those ornamental tourniquet-and-candy- box knots which only Waugh knows how to tie. But Waugh's dross and gloss should deceive nobody for long; he has become one of the most deadly serious moralists of his generation. Every one of his novels had its masked importance. History helps make Put Out More Flags his most important book...
...once warm and chill the hearts of hundreds of innocent, scared, suspected, non-fifth-columnists. It also helps bring the book into line for its surprising epilogue. France fallen, and Sir Joseph Mainwaring blathering along about the war's having entered "a new and more glorious phase," Waugh girds up his ghosts in their brave, schoolboyish excitement over the newborn Commandos (he belongs him-self...
...ladder I couldn't. I see that." It is not quite easy to believe in the Basil of the epilogue who says, "There's only one serious occupation for a chap now, that's killing Germans," good as he might well be at the job. But Waugh's tag line brings every page of the book into razor focus...
...There's a new spirit abroad," beams that infallible master of misinformation, Sir Joseph, "I see it on every side." "And poor booby," Waugh concludes, "he was bang right...