Word: waughs
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...DIARIES OF EVELYN WAUGH...
British literary events usually arrive in the U.S. disheveled, talked out and a year late. As Evelyn Waugh noted, however, "punctuality is the virtue of the bored," and there was little time to be that last September when 800 pages of his diaries fell on London like a V1. The buzz had been heard for some time. The Observer and the London Sunday Times had teased a few thin, gray hairs of scandal with prepublication excerpts. Christopher Sykes' authorized biography appeared soon after. It made ample use of the diaries that Waugh began in 1911 at age seven...
...Since Waugh's own death, his reputation has been skillfully embalmed by the Joyboys of journalism and lit-crit. More precisely, there are two reputations: the artist and the man. Waugh the writer needs little touching up. Such novels as Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust, Scoop and that masterpiece of World War II, the Sword of Honour trilogy, established him as one of the century's finest satirists. The Diaries underscore just how closely Waugh's fiction followed his life, from high jinks at public school to the hallucinations chronicled...
...story of the man is a perennial rerun in England where it is constantly looped through a culture whose modern alterations were both feared and foreseen by the conservative Waugh. It is the story of a modest publisher's son whose intelligence, ambition and talent lofted him from the bourgeois professional class into the world of the Bright Young People, titled literati and London clubs, where a gentleman might get gloriously or morosely drunk amongst his peers...
...Mitford sisters did not exist, Evelyn Waugh would have had to invent them. Their splendid improbability makes his ongoing saga of the decline and fall of the English upper class read like an understatement. Take for instance Nancy Mitford, one of the Mad Young Things of the '20s and a bitter-comic novelist in her own right, who ended up in self-imposed exile in Paris, musing about Louis XIV. Or consider the two fascist Mitfords: Diana, who married Sir Oswald Mosley, Führer of the British Blackshirts, and Unity, a prized exotic of Hitler's inner...