Word: waughs
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...epidemic proportions during the '20s and '30s. It would be easier to list English authors who did not write travel books during the period than to name all those who did. These included D.H. Lawrence, Norman Douglas, E.M. Forster, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and Evelyn Waugh, among scores of others. The English had always been energetic travelers; the Empire had seen to that. But Fussell thinks that the modern exodus that began in 1918 was different and that the chief difference was World...
...arguing that the travel books of the period deserve attention as works of narrative art. Some of the volumes he likes best are no longer in print, a sad situation that his own book may help remedy. A single passage by Evelyn Waugh in Labels is more than enough to justify all that roaming around that so many did: "I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset; the mountain almost invisible in a blur of pastel grey, glowing on the top and then repeating its shape, as though reflected, in a wisp of grey...
...great vitality, unabashed tenderness, grotesque humor and a grouchy reverence for things as they were. In some respects, the book is a Jewish Brideshead Revisited, the sacred and profane memoirs of an exaggerated autobiographical character named Joshua Shapiro, a Montreal writer and TV personality. A resemblance to Evelyn Waugh's novel is not farfetched. Richler twice borrows the comic master's line about the companions of his youth: "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know." In addition, the prodigal North American seems to have learned much from Waugh about episodic plotting and mixing poignant and farcical events...
...understand rather than attack; he often acknowledges the criticism of others so that he can temper it. He calls Edmund Wilson's plain, sometimes blunt style "democratic, in the sense that this distinguished man will not for long allow one phrase to be better than another." Evelyn Waugh is similarly pardoned: "To object to his snobbery is as futile as objecting to cricket, for every summer the damn game comes round again whether you like...
...Waugh's satire would not be lost on Wilfred Thesiger, who wandered through some of the world's most hostile wastes for nearly 50 years with little more than the native garb on his back, some medicines, a few books, a camera and a rifle. Thesiger, now almost 70 and based in Kenya, is the last of the exotic British adventurer-writers whose exclusive number included Sir Richard Burton and T.E. Lawrence. These chameleons assumed the language, dress and habits of their tribal hosts for deeply emotional as well as practical reasons. "Like many English travelers," Thesiger confesses...