Word: waughs
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...Waugh's politics, though, were never serious enough to earn him much praise or blame. "In politics," Sykes comments, "he was without loyalties, and had only dislikes." And his snobbishness had its limits--it stopped where the person in question, of howsoever impeccable a pedigree, was dull...
Sykes is sketchy on Waugh's early life, which is not too unfortunate since Waugh himself has left a brilliant, hilarious account of the first twenty-odd years of his life in a book called A Little Learning. Waugh came from a nexus of English intellectuals--descended from Henry, Lord Cockburn (a very prominent Scottish judge and ancestor of Claud and Alexander Cockburn), and related to Edmund Gosse and Holman Hunt. His father was managing director of a publishing firm which didn't have much to worry about as it owned the Dickens copyright. (This remarkable man gave up holding...
Sykes comes into his own when the Second World War begins. Waugh was so hated by his men that his commanding officer refused to send him into combat because he was sure he would "be killed, and not by the enemy." The Commander went further and posted an allnight guard around Waugh's sleeping quarters. Towards the end of the war Waugh met Winston Churchill's son Randolph in the bar of White's Club, and as a result wound up being parachuted behind the lines in Yugoslavia. Waugh's first diary entry reads "Tito like lesbian" and from then...
After the War, Waugh sank into a psychotic state. He became literally incapable of meeting anyone without insulting him. He developed a persecution complex...
Finally, an eminent psychiatrist diagnosed Waugh's problem--what had sapped his creative energies and ruined his private life for nearly a decade--as the effect of the combination of alcohol and barbiturates. Although he partially recovered, Waugh's delusions returned in the months before his death (from a heart attack...