Word: waughs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Kundera commits some of the funniest literary savaging since Evelyn Waugh polished off Dickens in A Handful of Dust. Running through it is some wonderfully comic sexual burlesque-as, for instance, when Jaromil and his girl are making love, and his mother, hearing her moans (and knowing perfectly well what is happening), comes rushing into the room with a bottle of medicine and a teaspoon...
...cloak-and-dagger man in Africa and Europe. Among Muggeridge's notable colleagues of that tune were Graham Greene and the double agent Kim Philby. Spying depressed Muggeridge so that he even flirted with suicide one night in Mozambique by swimming out to sea. Unlike Evelyn Waugh, whose attempt to drown himself was foiled by a sting from a jellyfish, Muggeridge simply turned back to shore "without thinking or deciding." Through it all, he affects to find his younger self as vain and misguided as the rest of mankind...
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is one of the best tales of the year so far. But by le Carré's highest standards it is, as Evelyn Waugh remarked in another connection, simply "creamy English charm playing tigers...
Wodehouse characters, Waugh once said, "have never tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden." Indeed, a wonderful, innocent foolishness makes them all irresistible: Wallace Chesney, Rodney Spelvin, Blizzard the butler, and the Wrecking Crew (four retired businessmen whose progress over the course resembles "one of those great race migrations of the Middle Ages"). As befits an idyl, the weather is routinely gorgeous ("butterflies loafed languidly, birds panted in the shady recesses of the trees"), and the sun shines gently...
...Waugh's words now sound ironic. As it celebrated its independence last week after 324 years of first French and then British rule, tiny Grenada (pronounced Gre-noy-da) and its two sister islands were wracked by disorder and threatened by civil war. Telephone and electric service have been out since the beginning of the year, and a general strike has crippled the country's economy. Bananas, one of Grenada's major exports, lie rotting in the fields, and nutmeg and cocoa, the two other principal crops, are piled up in warehouses with no one to load...