“... on Augustus John, J.E. Morpurgo on Allen Lane, Ronald Lewin on Slim and Christopher Sykes on Evelyn Waugh. On the other hand, we do get José Harris on Beveridge, James Lees-Milne on Harold Nicolson, O.S. Nock on Stanier, and Hugh Thomas on John Strachey. In such circumstances, where the great have already received the supreme accolade, there is ...”

“... in them may indeed give its particular bite and personality to his fantasy, as in the case of Evelyn Waugh, or it may impose limitations on his sense of reality, as Furbank feels it does in the case of Meredith and Thackeray. (There is even something self-limiting about Tom Jones as a novel – for the same kind of reason?) As Furbank points out, the ...”

“... two years later went over to Rome, to the quiet joy of her husband and the fervid satisfaction of Evelyn Waugh. It appears that church-going in Oxford had become an embarrassment, ‘with Frank alone turning to the right for St Aloysius and the rest of us’ – mother and three children – ‘turning left for St Paul’s’. This, she felt, was no way ...”

“... unusually entertaining and takes us back into a world of British upper-class twits familiar from Evelyn Waugh, Osbert Lancaster and P. G. Wodehouse – at times, it reads almost like ‘Bertie Wooster goes to Russia.’ The typical British army officer seconded to Russia after the war was a product of prep and public schools and Sandhurst, captured by ...”

“... with any regularity: matching in popularity ... the histories of Arthur Bryant and the novels of Evelyn Waugh.’ Around the same time, Edith too was hitting the jackpot with her full-hearted Fanfare for Elizabeth. And when Cyril Connolly – himself a somewhat Osbertish phenomenon, without the wealth – devoted a 1947 number of Horizon to persuading ...”

“... these conferences. Jessica Mitford had just sold a million copies of The American Way of Death and Evelyn Waugh had already weighed in with The Loved One and talk had turned at cocktail parties to ‘barbaric rituals’ and ‘morbid curiosities’. The mortuary associations were scrambling for some cover. Clergy and educators and psychologists – the ...”

“... James Hewitt, Madam Vasso and the rest. Thus described by Kelley, the House of Windsor is part Evelyn Waugh, part Tom Sharpe, wholly Spitting Image. It is not so much that she descends to personalities as that she is incapable of rising above them. But this is scarcely to say anything new: ‘too little, too late’ has been the general verdict here ...”

“... of Hollywood gossip. Similarly, he claimed to be fluent in almost every European language, though Evelyn Waugh noted that all he could really do was parrot a few well rehearsed little speeches and that it was a relief when it stopped. Like his immediate predecessors, he stressed the cult of Mary. Since there was no scriptural basis for the Virgin’s ...”

“... to have been thrown out with contemptuous ease. It proceeds at a pace – at the speed of an Evelyn Waugh satire, without a laugh in sight – while conveying in compressed form various of Naipaul’s long-standing themes or obsessions. The sense, for instance, of ideas and beliefs being passed between different cultures, becoming meaningless or ...”

“... book. Stewart’s stint in neo-imperial government begins with all the makings of a spoof by Evelyn Waugh. Stewart spent January 2002 tramping across ravaged Afghanistan – the subject of his travelogue The Places In Between (2004) – after which a few months back on his ancestral Scottish turf was enough to revive a yen for adventure. When the ...”

“... of his typewriter. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are a staple of the National Curriculum, and Evelyn Waugh saw the possibility of comedy in the matter before anybody else, his William Boot a writer keen to make the rat-tat-tat of his typewriter fall into sync with the sound of gunfire over the hill. In America, a season in France or a period in the ...”

“... news of the war in East Africa consists of a series of facts of uncertain implication; for Evelyn Waugh, in Scoop (1938), it consists of wild surmise further embellished by Fleet Street hacks. The more apt comparison might be Claude McKay’s breezily satirical Amiable with Big Teeth, set in Harlem in the period after the invasion, an event of ...”

“... boys, had disillusioned him with patriotism.At Oxford, he became close friends with his cousin Evelyn Waugh (both were great-grandsons of Lord Henry Cockburn, the brilliant and lovable judge whose memoirs are a late triumph of the Scottish Enlightenment). Their politics were about as far apart as imagination could stretch (...”

“... sensitive eye for landscape and topography and a seismographic intelligence. Like Kinglake and Evelyn Waugh, he resorted to comic hyperbole; like Mark Twain, he dramatised his disenchantments and was a great one for sweeping half-facetious generalisation: Greece was a fraud, Poland dreary, Australia a bore, Japan primitive, Java a ...”

“... too spasmodically. I would have preferred her memories shaped into fiction by Angus Wilson, or Evelyn Waugh. Joan Wyndham, it would seem, has found no retreat: she has been so busy skimming the waters of the deep, with youngsters on their first adventures, that she has never settled upon one of those harbours where elderly boats are beached. Her ...”