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“... Heh, heh!’ went the judge in the Thorpe trial, Mr Justice Cantley. According to Auberon Waugh, who sat in the press benches all through the six weeks of the Old Bailey proceedings, he made a habit of it: his own jokes, the floundering of witnesses, the incredible spectacle over which he was presiding, all presented matter for a good heh ...”

“... Actually, more than offensive. I think I would want to do something pretty unpleasant to A. Waugh. But what? Go around London ‘whingeing’ about the awfulness of what he’d done to me? No good at all. He would hear about it from one of his six friends and then fit me up in his column as some kind of snivelling, narcissistic bore. Write a letter to ...”

“... When Evelyn Waugh died in 1966, his son Auberon felt that a ‘great brooding presence’ had been lifted ‘not only from the house but from the whole of existence’. Auberon was in his twenties then, and – as he tells it in his book of memoirs – he had long ago got used to living in the shadow of his famously unpleasant dad ...”

“... On​ National Service in Cyprus in 1958, Auberon Waugh, having ‘miraculously’ become an officer, was sent out with his troop to cover the Nicosia-Kyrenia road between the Turkish village of Guenyeli and the Greek village of Autokoi. This was during the civil war at the time known as the Cyprus Emergency, and the aim of the mission was to prevent either village taking reprisals against the other ...”

“... politics are rightish, its stance prurient, and its key figures Nigel Dempster, Peter McKay and Auberon Waugh. The radical lampoon has become required reading on the magazine syllabus of every Sloane Ranger. Moreover, the Eye, that fearless exposer of the faintest mafia, now runs a comfortable little establishment of its own. Consider how this book ...”

“... day. I was rather shocked by the appearance of a long review by Barbara Cartland.’ In April 1979 Auberon Waugh wrote to him: ‘My friend Ferdie Mount has not drawn a sober breath since hearing of some kind word you sent about him to Alexander Chancellor.’ Greene had written to Skvorecky about Evelyn Waugh: ‘He ...”

“... chose for the reprint of Kenneth Hudson’s The Jargon of the Professions were a moral lot. Auberon Waugh, writing for what should now be called Books and Bookpersons, declared that ‘Mr Hudson writes with the elegance, precision and wit of a Fowler ... a delight to read and a mine of useful instruction’, while Peter Clayton, in the sterner ...”

“... of his novels.The star fiction-reviewers were brought out in force: Bernard Levin (Sunday Times), Auberon Waugh (Daily Mail), John Osborne in the very first ‘John Osborne Review’ in the New Standard, a launching to which Quentin Oates devoted some well-placed sarcasms in one of the pieces by him on Amis’s reviewers. Though a majority of reviews ...”

“... blue, in the Union, somebody asked her bullying husband for a divorce. Hurrah! Up in the Academy, Auberon Waugh, happy in the corner and cushioned by an IRA informer or two, bought a round of drinks and told me he’d just run a review of my first book. He said it wasn’t at all bad. ‘What, the review or the book?’ I asked. ‘The review,’ he ...”

“... but newsworthy controversy followed its nomination for the Booker shortlist. An appalled Auberon Waugh made a public objection, on the principled grounds that it wouldn’t do to make every taxi driver think they had a novel in them. ‘If the judges give the Booker Prize to a bus driver for the sake of publicity,’ he said, ‘I shall despise ...”

“... in the aspic of nostalgia just because they are so laughable – the viewpoint of Wodehouse, Waugh, Nancy Mitford and Peter Simple. The term ‘novelty’, which now gets translated as ‘trendy’ or ‘fashionable’, becomes a dirty word. ‘Feeling profound or vehement’ is reserved for those who wish to change society – for Tony Benn, the ‘Race ...”

“... After all, “European high culture” is a phrase which would have your average critic – an Auberon Waugh, an A.N. Wilson – reaching for a metaphorical shotgun.’ At this point the country is being said to be debarred from sharing in a tradition which, as Kundera himself has made clear, it helped to invent. Taylor later says that categorising is ...”

“... to pad out tome after fresh tome on Graham Greene, or George Orwell, or P.G. Wodehouse, or Evelyn Waugh, or Bernard Shaw, or Cyril Connolly? Must we prepare our shelves for yet another cache of letters, stumbled across like Dead Sea scrolls, every decade? If so, will they, too, rank high with biographers as first-hand testimony to what the subject was ...”

“... that Goldsmith was intrigued by the personalities of contributors to the magazine, Messrs Waugh, West, Gillard and Marnham, and would have liked to have been editor of Private Eye. Goldsmith’s aversion to the Eye certainly seems to have been different from the conventional dislike. It may have touched off fears of a deep and dangerous conspiracy ...”

“... have to be sex in it. But sex scenes are difficult to write at the best of times and just recently Auberon Waugh, from his offensive base at the Literary Review, has made things even more difficult by advertising a booby prize for the worst written sex scene in the coming year’s fiction. I start to tense up as I begin work on the first of my novel’s ...”