Evelyn Waugh Books

War is ugly, costly, and dangerous to one's health. What about when it's necessary? Does a just war ennoble those who face it, or debase them further? Perhaps both?

Evelyn Waugh's "Put Out More Flags", published in 1942, may be one of his least known novels but is probably his bravest. It is at once a light comic farce and an acid morality play, mocking Great Britain's leadership, its war effort, and its smug culture at a time when Hitler's guns were pointed just a few miles off England's coast.

Waugh pulls in nearly every major figure from his previous five novels from the 1930s, led by Basil Seal of "Black Mischief" fame. He's still the conniving rascal of that earlier novel, using a spy scare to take advantage of an innocent with a nice apartment and a trio of vicious child refugees from bomb-threatened London as the snare for a lucrative extortion racket.

"Faultless timing," crows Basil at the outset. "That's always been Hitler's strong point."

Will Basil find redemption from his squalid state? Well, he sort of has to, given the time in which the novel is written. But Waugh holds off on that until nearly the end, and uses the background of the so-called "Phony War" to ask a lot of worthy questions about patriotism and honor, sending up principals as a way of backhandedly touting their value.

A homosexual leftist rejects the pieties of both sides and notes in China, educated scholars didn't care "a tinker's hoot" if their lands were invaded. Nothing means anything in the long run, not even Hitler, who he sees as a figure for a comic lampoon. A fusty old aristocrat sees ridiculously silver linings in every cloud. Are the Soviets aligned with Hitler? Good! That'll bring the Italians on our side.

Urging her son to enlist, a mother hastens to add: "The Army is very full just at present. Things will be much easier when we have some casualties."

Does Waugh pull all this on its head and show how brave a fight, how noble a battle, World War II really was? Well, I can't see him selling any war bonds, but he's not Lord Haw-Haw either. His interest is less on winning and losing than what the newness of the war reveals in a society on the verge of being distracted to death. "The fog lifts, the world sees us as we are, and worse still we see ourselves as we are."

But in his cold and reckless satire of the society games, love matches, and assorted sordid escapades of Seal and others, one gets a hint of something else, that only a free society can blow away such a fog and discover not only its flaws but things worth fighting for.

There's only a taste of combat near the end, a battlefield in Norway abstractly rendered. For the most part the war being dealt with is more mental than physical, if not exactly phony, given the various ways we see it affecting the figures in this drama. Waugh plays up the comedy more than he would in his later treatment of the war, "Sword Of Honour", but he plumbs the same depths and leaves similarly uneasy questions. "Put Out All Flags" is a great introduction to serious Waugh.

This is one the great comic novels of the history of the world. I would expect it would not be quite the work to start out with, but for people aware of what Britain was like during the first days of WWII, this is pure pleasure.
The book, like most of Waugh's satires, contains a number of secondary characters who are often quite amusing. In this Waugh is the equal of Dickens (a comparison Waugh might not have appreciated), in his celebration of the English eccentric. From a technical execution the novel is rather interesting in that its main character, its anti-hero, Basil Seal, is somewhat of a character himself.

Basil Seal originally appeared in the work "Black Mischief" is a trickster, eternally on the lookout for a way of earning a dishonest living. Basil's life is complicated by the outbreak of war and the insistance by the women in his life to play a hero's part in it (preferably dying while do so, in the case of his mother).

Possessed of considerable guile he hotfoots it off to the country where he runs a profitable extortion racket involving three very undesirable war refugee children. These obnoxious brats manage to destroy most of the stately cottages of, if not the upper classes, then the upper middle classes.

Another central character in the book is Ambrose Silk. Silk wishes the war would go away and at the same time wonders what his role should be. Eventually he settles on publishing an arts magazine, whose most notable work celebrates his love for a German soldier is twisted into Nazi propaganda by Basil working as a counterespionage agent.
Though filled with topical humor, "Put out More Flags" manages to transcend the time in which it was written. It contains a number of thinly disguised portraits of famous people. If anyone is curious as to the various identities, I would recommend Humphrey Carpenter's excellent work, "The Brideshead Generation."

The work is also interesting for fans of Waugh as
well. It is the second to last of his "funny" books. The next books would take on a more serious tone. Waugh's next book would be Brideshead Revisited. With the exception of "The Loved One" Waugh's later works would take on a seriousness which ultimately would set him apart from his contemporaries. I also recently read "The Sword of Honour" Trilogy and it is interesting to compare this work with "Put out More Flags." The themes are similar, but the approach is markedly different. This book shows Waugh as a writer who had already conquered many worlds, but at the same time was preparing to take on new challenges.

The eight months between the declaration of the Second World War in September 1939 and the German invasion of France in May 1940 were referred to, even at the time, in Britain as "the phony war." Military conscription began, blackouts and food rationing were imposed, and many families with children were evacuated from the cities, but there were no air raids and no major deployments of British forces overseas. So many wealthier people who had shut up their London houses in the autumn returned there for the winter season. Evelyn Waugh's satirical account of the period, written only a couple of years later, deals with a group of upper-class Englishmen and women for whom the whole period was mainly a matter of dressing up as soldiers, and "doing one's duty" was an opportune antidote to boredom.

This is a very funny book, but it may not be accessible to everyone. Here, as a kind of litmus test, is a passage from the beginning of the book. One of the characters, a society hostess, has just heard the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announce the declaration of war over the radio:

"It was quite true, thought Lady Seal; Neville Chamberlain had spoken surprisingly well. She had never liked him very much, neither him nor his brother -- if anything she had preferred the brother -- but they were uncomfortable, drab fellows both of them. However, he had spoken very creditably that morning, as though at last he were fully alive to his responsibilities. She would ask him to luncheon. But perhaps he would be busy; the most improbable people were busy in wartime, she remembered."

That "most improbable" made me laugh loud enough to disturb several neighboring diners, but I recognize that the patronizing understatement is a very British sort of humor. If you find this passage funny, then by all means read the book; it is a masterpiece. Otherwise, be warned. It is not just the humor that may be impenetrable, but the large cast of characters, whose social status and interconnections are indicated in the most subtle ways, by the kinds of names they are given or the addresses at which they live. This is a book that really cries out for an annotated edition, giving lists of characters and family trees, explanations of the historical events taking place offstage, and notes on the numerous cultural matters that are referenced obliquely; the leftist poets Parsnip and Pimpernell who have emigrated to America, for instance, must surely be a sly dig at Auden and Isherwood. And yet the novel would sink under the weight of such an apparatus criticus; it is a soufflé of frivolity topped with meringue.

But not quite a soufflé. Reviewing Waugh's A HANDFUL OF DUST (1934) a year or so ago, I remarked that a book which began with the farcical doings of a group of upper-class drones who might have come straight out of P. G. Wodehouse changed half-way to develop something of the moral weight of Graham Greene. Hearing PUT OUT MORE FLAGS talked about, I expected a similar tragicomic trajectory. The book does indeed get more serious as it goes on, but in a less obvious way which I think makes it the greater novel. The reader knows that the war will not remain phony for long, and this makes the melodramatic events that produced the climax in the earlier book quite unnecessary here. Secondly, even in its frivolous early stages, the book shows a breadth of cultural awareness, nicely balanced between real-world events and dinner-table conversation, that gives it dimension from the start. Thirdly, there is the moral element; Waugh, another Catholic, is as much of a moralist as Greene, only with a lighter touch. As they are affected by the war, many of the characters take surprising turns which reveal them as moral individuals, sometimes weaker than we had thought, but often stronger, and always more sympathetic. Or almost always; Waugh maintains a rather disturbing sense of moral ambiguity. Basil Seal, the cheerful sponger antihero of the novel, is as much fun as Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, and the war gives him opportunity for increasingly audacious schemes. But by the end, real people are getting hurt by them. You root for him, you laugh at his successes, but then you wonder if you should be laughing.... I am still working that one out.

Basil Seal, familiar to readers of Black Mischief (1932) as the man hired by one of his Oxford friends, the ruler of an African nation, to modernize it, has returned to England, his ludicrous efforts at modernization for naught. It is the autumn of 1939 (in this 1942 novel), just as war is breaking out, and Basil, one of the "bright, young things" on whom Waugh casts his satiric eye and biting wit, is bored. Penniless, he accepts his sister Barbara's suggestion to help her to place urban children with rural families to protect them from the incipient bombings. Soon he has turned this in to a profitable business--country house residents are more than willing to pay Basil NOT to bring three especially monstrous children, to live with them.

Strong on character, grim humor, and satire, and short on overall plot, Waugh has created in this novel characters who represent the worst of upperclass young people--their shallow interests, indifferent education, frivolous behavior, lack of long-term goals, and seeming absence of any values except pleasure. Basil has had a long affair with Angela Lyne, but dallies with other women. Angela's cuckolded husband Cedric enlists in the war effort, while she, lonely, turns to drink. Ambrose Silk, half-Jewish and openly gay, works to establish a literary magazine until he runs afoul of the censors (in the person of Basil). Two writers, Parsnip and Pimpernel, reputed to have been modeled on W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, run off to the States to avoid the war completely.

As the novel moves from autumn, 1939, to the summer of 1940, when the mobilization is fully underway, Waugh skewers the naivete of his subjects and their universal desire to use the war to get ahead. None of them take the war seriously, nor do they realize that the very fabric of their country is at stake. Basil and friends want to be among "the hard-faced men [of 1919] who did well out of the war." Image is more important than reality, which they seem determined to ignore.

The last of Waugh's satiric novels (since his later novels become far more serious), this one is full of ironic humor directed at the (usually) wealthy young people who allow life to happen to them, assuming that they will always be able to make lemonade from lemons. In the course of the novel, all will come to new understandings, and when France falls, the scene is set for reversals and revelations. Fun to read and historically important for the attitudes it records among this group, Put Out More Flags is classic Waugh satire. n Mary Whipple

Black Mischief
The Loved One (Penguin Modern Classics)
Brideshead Revisited

This is Waugh's satirical look at England at the beginning of WW II, with two characters in particular receiving his sharp and witty arrows of reproach: Basil Seal, a military big-shot wannabe who ends up relocating London slum children when the army rejects him; and Ambrose Silk, an aesthete, who gets a job with the religious division of the Ministry of Information representing Atheists. Silk becomes a dupe in an anti-fascist scheme of Seal's that is hilarious while at the same time being pathetic. This was the time of the so-called "phony war," when things were yet relatively quiet in England and some people (the Basils) were only "playing" at war. Waugh lampoons this attitude and these people mercilessly in this novel. In this book, as usual, Waugh is "the first-rate comic genius" critics declared him to be.

Waugh, is an acquired taste. The Trilogy, now just published as one book was originally made up of the following

"Men at Arms" -- here we are introduced to Mr. Guy Crouchback, the Catholic survivor of an old, disgarded, and increasing impoverished patrician family in England at the beginning of the War. Guy is not so much interested in getting into the war as he is in finding his own place in this war. He's 35 and too old for the line regiments and not of the right "stuff" for the special guards regiments. By a fluke he ends up in the mythical Royal Halbedier Regt. as an officer cadet. In his entire time here we find the class system transposed more or less intact into the army, where incompetence and pure idiosyncracy is rewarded and individuality discouraged.

We find a gallery of both lovable and boffish rouges. We find the classic British Army hard-man psychopath Brigadier Hook. And we find the taudry and often tragic relationships shaped by a system they may be able to hide from, but from whose moral sanction they cannot escape.

Guy gets selected for the ill-fated Dakar expedition. He makes a name of himself by secretly raiding the coast held by the Free French. He does so under Brig. Hook's mischevious order. After he and Hook return to be court-martialed, Guy finds himself once again a perrenial outsider. (Also please note the absolutely hillarious chapter where Guy attempts to seduce his divorced wife).

"Officers And Gentleman"

Guy is back and he and Brig Hook are promoted for audicity "in the face of the enemy" -- by Churchill and posted to a new Commando type group training on a remote island in Scotland. Guy and friends get into more trouble than training and find themselves all geared up for Crete and land just long enough to find out that they are defeated and need to be withdrawn.

"Unconditional Surrender"

Where Guy is landed to support the Tito's partisans. He finds out that people he is supporting, appear to be little different in their extreme methods than the fascists he is trying to overthrow.

Through all the books there is the slow pervading rot of the English class system fighting it last battle against fascism. A battle that must be faught, but one whose hard cynical questions Guy is already asking himself -- what about Stalin... he appears to be a frightful rotter, killing people because of their class, constantly getting screwed the class system, Guy advances by luck, and incomptence seems to reign and strategy made on according to what comes to mind in the heads of the brass hats... All the while his Catholicism is also hanging on for dear life... ready to take a plunge off the cliff of aetheism.

Since Waugh actually faught in most of the campaigns he describes, we need to take him seriously. But he is ultimately not a more accurate source for the events of WWII, but rather a anti-hero, cynical view of the events -- more a counter balance to the guts and glory stereotype, but not necessarily more correct or accurate.

For those who are not so familiar with pre-war British speech and do not know what a Bangalore Torpedo, or what it means to "blot your book" there may be a few problem. I can see some American readers having a bit of a time with the vocabulary. At its most brilliant however Waugh offers us a great view of life and people, with all their problems, in a way that we perhaps would rather not think of them. It is a tour-de-force of a book... stays with you for a rather long time.

Guy Crouchback is almost saintly. He is Catholic, patriotic, and selfless. When World War II comes along he is eager to serve his country and to be thrown into the caldron of war. But, by his own admission, he is not "simpatico" and he always seems to be the square peg trying to fit into a round hole. Perhaps his military career parallels that of the author, Evelyn Waugh.

There is of course no place for Guy in the British Army where his hard work and dedication are little rewarded and his war experiences are spotted with malfortune, little of which is of his own making. Guy "blots his copy book" early on and ends up being suspected of spying for the Italians. Waugh dots this novel with a cast of clownish characters and comic adventures in which Guy sadly participates.

Waugh's irreverent attitude toward World War II has probably made this novel less popular than it should have been. For example, at the opening of the war, Crouchback wonders why England, in the face of simultaneous invasions of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union, chose to go to war with one and not the other. At another point, Guy muses that "he was engaged in a war in which courage and a just cause were quite irrelevant to the issue." In the best Waughian tradition, he does a hatchet job on the much-celebrated Yugoslav resistance movement of Marshall Tito.

Waugh, oddly enough, has also made the interesting comment that he wrote the "obituary" of the Roman Catholic Church in England with this novel. I take him at his word although perhaps I can't fully appreciate the Catholic subtleties of the novel.

Waugh originally published this novel in three volumes between 1952 and 1962. He then published the three volumes in one, omitting "tedious" passages. One of the tedious passages he omitted was, to me, the most memorable of the book -- the tale of children evacuated from London at the beginning of the war and thrust, with hilarious consequences, upon the country gentry for caretaking. So, you might read the novels -- Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and The End of the Battle -- separately as well as together.

Beyond thrillers, World War II doesn't seem to have inspired a lot of good novels. Waugh's comic, sad, and cynical novel is one of the best.

Smallchief

Great fun. The sort of thing that you read in the study with an open fire, a glass of 10 year old port and a cigar smouldering in the ashtray, the Great Dane snoring in the corner next to the mahogany sideboard.

Or that's the image that the book throws up.

I really enjoyed the book, wit in bucketfuls with an irony and a poignancy that had me chuckling away in time to the Great Danes' snoring.

Waugh takes you to the world of officers and gentlemen that he obviously experienced during his own wartime service- the injustice, the inept leadership and the crazed bravado of some of those around him. The waiting, the rumour, the boredom, the politics and luck, both good and bad are all major players in this book. The class system of officers and privates- all of the ingredients that make a Waugh book are here.

Oh yeah: and he fully describes and realises the insignificance of one soldier in the great scheme of things in an army, no matter how hard that one man wants to make a real difference.

Watch out for the exploits of the great Richie Hook- comic relief and so incredibly un-PC it will make you winch and laugh at the same time

Though "Brideshead Revisited" may be his best known work, nothing conveys Waugh's sense of the world better than "The Sword of Honour" trilogy.

His sacramental view of earthly reality is best expressed in a memorable exchange between Guy Crouchback, the book's protagonist, and an obviously overwhelmed Anglican minister.

"... Do you agree," [Guy] asked earnestly, "that the Supernatural Order is not something added to the Natural Order, like music or painting, to make everday life more tolerable? It is everyday life. The supernatural is real; what we call 'real' is a mere shadow, a passing fancy. Don't you agree, Padre?"

"Up to a point." [said the Padre]

Sadly, Alfred A. Knopf's Everyman's Library, a collection of books intended to preserve and popularize the classics of modern literature, isn't up to the task. The binding is stiff and cheap, and the gold embossed lettering on the cover literally disintegrates in your hands. I bought this book hoping it would last a lifetime, but I'll be lucky if it survives the coming year.

Read Waugh for the tonic that he is, but avoid the Everyman's Library like the publishing plague that it is.

The best of Evelyn Waugh works, this trilogy is the perfect combination of story and history. Waugh's actual experience during the war leaves its mark all over the place, as well as his particular brand of humor - and his distaste for communism. Great read for anyone who wants to be entertained by a touching story, and see how the war was fought by the British, and why they turned against Churchill when it was won. Even if you don't care about any of that, the jokes are still fantastic, and most of the characters are brilliantly developed. They don't make novels like these ones anymore.

This critical analysis of Evelyn Waugh's work and life is outstanding. It convincingly describes the beliefs and motives behind his writing and avoids anachronism. If you want to understand the man, his thought and his times this is the book to read.

If anyone who wishes to learn more about the life and the works of Evelyn Waugh, this may not be the biography for him. Currently, there are three major biographies of Waugh-Stannard, Sykes, and Patey. Stannard's work is cumbersome, and often his prose is awkward, but it is certainly well worth reading for its inclusiveness. Sykes is more of a reminiscence of friendship, including anecdotes that he was privy to. Patey is the first author of apply high literary criticism to Waugh in the kind of form that a professor is apt to do. He responds specifically to continual problems raised in Waugh scholarship and provides far more coherent and concrete answers than Stannard or Sykes even attempt. He organizes the biography with an eye on chronology, but also addresses issues thematically which is brilliant, and simple, but what few literary biographies do. Bravo Mr. Patey! Thank you very much for your hard work on this matter. His biography is also meticulously footnoted.

Though half the length of the other standard biographies (Sykes, Stannard, and Hastings), Patey's book is more interesting and more insightful. He provides a context for Waugh's thoughts, so that some of EW's positions seem less strange. Patey also defends Waugh's books against the vicious criticism to which they have often been subjected. Another strength is Patey's explanation of what redeems even the non-Catholic characters. The surprising answer: the ability to love. Patey doesn't carry this point all the way through, and sometimes he seems too sympathetic to Waugh. Still, I'd rather re-read his biography than any of the others.

Critics have tended to split Evelyn Waugh into two authors: the hysterically funny satirist who wrote books like "Vile Bodies" and "The Loved One," and the very conservative Catholic writer who gave us "Brideshead Revisited" and other works. Patey shatters this shallow understanding, demonstrating convincingly that Waugh's satire, like Swift's, is solidly based on a system of positive values -- in Waugh's case, pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic religion. Patey's treatment of this aspect of Waugh, so central to him as a writer and as a man, is simply masterful. I have always found this side of Waugh distasteful, but through Patey, I found myself pulled into an intense and exciting dialogue with Waugh and his beliefs. The treatment of Waugh's life is equally superb. Perhaps more than any other genre, satire requires a knowledge of its historical context to be appreciated. Patey seems to know everything about everyone Waugh ever met, and to have read and understood everything Waugh might ever have read. He has synthesized it all and delivered it in a prose style so clear and unobtrusive that you don't appreciate it until you reflect on what he's accomplished with it. And he lets Waugh make all the jokes. There's much about Waugh to dislike, but Patey provides an understanding of the man and his art that reconciles us to him. And besides, how can you hold a grudge against an author who names a character Aimee Thanatogenous?

I loved it the first time but may be enjoying it even more the second--possibly because in the interim I have read Beerbohm (Zuleika Dobson in particular; the existence of which this book made me aware), Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, and others. (In some ways this group literary biography tops Powell's work - by the end of Time, I felt a bit worn out by the multitude of characters who appeared so briefly, whereas here I feel like I get a bead on even the most minor "characters." Very much feel like I'm in the company of someone who knows his stuff--knows the best stories--has an eye for great detail and great anecdote, and an empathy (balanced by humor, or vice versa) for his subjects. And he's sitting there in a study with a ton of personal letters and memoirs and diaries spread out on the table, pointing out the best bits. Excellent writer, too. And no, I am no relation....

This is an admirable book, well written, balanced and well researched. After a slightly hesitant start, the scene shifts to Oxford in the early twenties; it comes across as a very dissolute place, with distinct homosexual undertones. The noticeable "public school" backdrop leaves you wondering why anyone should send their child to an English boarding school (at very great expense, incidentally). But they did, and still do. However, at Oxford we are introduced to a veritable galaxy of talent, including Evelyn Waugh, the lead character in the book, Graham Greene, John Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, Anthony Powell and others. There are some very amusing quotes and anecdotes.

But the book becomes increasingly serious, and whilst not specifically a work of literary criticism, it cites reviews and gives the background to the works of Waugh and to a lesser extent others. It also looks at the curious world of the Roman Catholic convert. At the end I felt a little sad for Waugh and some of his contemporaries. In spite of their achievements, by no means all of them seemed happy.

Once again Ms. Mosley has submitted for public consumption a fascinating collection. The letters that flew back and forth between these two literary giants are sparkling, witty, nasty and fabulous. They shed light on a glorious world of nobility and debauchery. Their correspondence fixes in my mind the fact that Nancy Mitford is the greatest mind of this century. Genius! Sheer genius!

Brava, Ms. Mosley, brava!

Poor Evelyn (talented, grumpy, constantly worrying about money) writes to lovely Nancy (talented, cheerful, constantly worrying about her Colonel) about real or imagined slights. Nancy charmingly takes him down a few notches when he deserves it (sometimes he's a bit of a bully). It is a joy to read the letters, even the squabbles (but especially the gossip - I'll never think of Graham Greene in quite the same way again). The comfort of old friends. How I shrieked!! (as Nancy would say)

I agree with the other reviewer of this book that much of Evelyn Waugh's travel writing, at least in the 1930s when he was at his sharpest as a writer, was among the best in English in the twentieth century (comparable to Robert Byron and Peter Fleming), and that this title is at the top of the Waugh list. Readers should know, however, that there is a very inexpensive anthology of all of Waugh's travel writings available from amazon: Waugh Abroad (ISBN 1400040760). It is in hardcover in the Everyman series and amazon sells it new for less than $ 20. I may be overlooking something, but the anthology seems to be a far better choice: Evelyn Waugh went lots of places and wrote brilliantly about many, including but not limited to Ethiopia.

Today there are only two copies available on Amazon used books! What a great book. Only 169 pages, but a wonderful insight into the leadin to the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (not long before WWII) and thru to the early period of the consolidation of the Italian victory.
The super justly famous Evelyn Waugh created, in this book, a tremendously educational outline and insight into a whole period, and parts of it are so witty that tears of laughter were running down my face several times.

Interestingly, to me at least, the original purchaser of the copy I got evidently did so in 1986, in Nairobi. I have a feeling it is not available at your local newsstand, but if I knew how good it is and didn't already have it.. I'd sure be looking for it.

i have only read black mischief and am halfway through scoop but they are absolutely hilarious. totally incorrect politically but so on the mark funny. the plots seem quite similar but waugh never seems plot driven anyway. i have read many of his books and love them all. it is really good to have 3 in one hardback edition for this excellent price.

The purchase of Brideshead Revisited is one of sure investments in your library. You will revisit it very often because it is one of the books that keep you in their thrall forever. Actually, I have a copy in my desk in the office and pick it up to read a few pages when my students are late for meeting.
This is a book which can be read in many ways - most of which open up a new perspective on its contents and some of which may help you understand yourself and those you choose to share it with. It may be read as a Christian treatise (Waugh took this quite seriously) and a memoir of studies at Oxford in the 1920s. A story of a misplaced homosexual affection and story of decline of British aristocracy. Whichever way you choose you will not be disappointed.

This is a very short novel that took about four hours to read. It was first published by British writer, Arthur Evelyn Waugh (1903 - 1966), in 1934. Waugh is best known for novels such as Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Scoop, A Handful of Dust (the present novel), The Loved Ones, Brideshead Revisited, and the Sword of Honour trilogy.

The story is set in London and on a gentleman's farm outside of London. It involves a married couple in which the wife becomes restless. She drifts into an affair with unemployed young man who lives at home with his mother.

Overall, this is an excellent novel: well written, a compelling read, interesting, and it has a good story. The characters are excellent although the plot becomes a bit unrealistic at the end. I thought that the book was a bit short, and there could have been more character development and more details in the book. There is a feeling that the book is moving a bit too quickly towards the end. Otherwise it is fine.

This is a good 5 star read;the author shows traces of brilliance, but perhaps is short of being a masterpiece due to the flaws mentioned above: lack of character development, or emotions in the charcters, and an unrealistic ending.

If I had to describe the essays in this book in one word, that word would be "delicious." This is an excellent anthology of Waugh's journalism covering a wide variety of topics, including Hollywood, painting, literature, Marxism, Catholocism, and the state of what was then "modern" society.

The editor has grouped the articles into five chapters: "Myself," "Aesthete," "Man of Letters," "Conservative," and "Catholic." As those familiar with Waugh would expect (and most would probably hope), the writings, for the most part, exude Waugh's acerbic wit and unrepentent snobbery.

I was especially interested to read his response to a questionnaire sent by a Louis Aragon-led leftist group to writers in the British Isles. The inquiry asked: "Are you for or against the legal Government and the People of Republican Spain? Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism? For it is impossible any longer to take no side." The writers' responses were published in a 1937 issue of "Left Review."

I was aware of the episode and that Waugh was one of only two or three writers who did not express their support for "the People" of Republican Spain, but this anthology is the only place where I have been able to actually see his response: "...I am no more impressed by the 'legality' of the Valencia Government than are English Communists by the legality of the Crown, Lords and Commons...If I were a Spaniard I should be fighting for General Franco. As an Englishman I am not in the predicament of choosing between two evils. I am not a Fascist nor shall I become one unless it were the only alternative to Marxism. It is mischievous to suggest that such a choice is imminent."