Word: waughs
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...tabloid Mirror flayed the Times for "prejudiced and intemperate political judgment." Author Auberon Waugh wrote to the Times: "Your decision to suppress those aspects of the news which displease you strike me as differing only in its effectiveness from the Russian model...
...series of adventures that might have sprung from the imagination of Evelyn Waugh, Englishmen were sold leaky dugouts, assisted with false geographical information and detained as house pets by bemused native kings. Malaria felled the adventurers in wholesale lots. The curative properties of quinine had been known for two centuries, but the drug had been brought from Peru by Jesuits and thus was thought unfit for Protestants. At least one explorer, Richard Lander, was forced to drink poison. This ritual proved his good faith when he survived it, and he was permitted to watch human sacrifices. "The head is severed...
Marcus's latest book, Representations, is a collection of essays originally published in various magazines over a 15 year period, in appearance the sort of innocuous collection many successful critics produce from time to time. And in fact, a number of these pieces, such as those on Waugh, Faulkner and Hammett, have the character conventionally associated with such volumes--that of being well-written, perceptive and clever, but without a coherent purpose. The book as a whole, however, despite Marcus's protests to the contrary, reads like "an ideal project for literary studies," an embodiment of the benefits...
Meanwhile Waugh had published his World War II trilogy, Sword of Honour, which Sykes thinks is his best work. The trilogy has, I think, much of value in it, and Waugh's parody of his own Brideshead Revisited is among the funniest passages he ever wrote. But on the whole Sykes doesn't make his judgment stick. Waugh was not the man to interpret an event like the Second World War, and under the stress his humor coarsens and his elegiac tone become saccharine...
...Waugh's work has survived the age that produced it. We do not read Vile Bodies because it is a spoof of something we care about; we care about the Bright Young Things of Mayfair (if we care at all) only because of Vile Bodies and novels like it. Waugh's prose style is recognized as crystalline and authentic. His characters, born in a half-life between portrait and imagination, are fully his creations now, now that the originals have been forgotten. Those who insist on relegating Waugh to the position of a minor writer will have to be convinced...