“... of essays on major 20th-century writers, the criticism took a strongly secular turn: in this book, Evelyn Waugh is read as an ‘upper-class’ novelist, not a Roman Catholic one, and the anguished Catholic Graham Greene is said to be ‘more deeply influenced by the pressures and limits of a particular social world than the novels would have us ...”

“... records and membership in Holy Orders. Unfortunately the prosecution called no witnesses, though Evelyn Waugh was eager to stand in the box and argue that Lawrence ‘couldn’t write for toffee’. Stephen Tumin’s preface notes that ‘together with the trial of Dr Stephen Ward’, the Lady Chatterley acquittal ‘introduced the Sixties as an age of ...”

“... communion by our apparently perfect manner of worshipping our God. If so, he is a latecomer (like Evelyn Waugh in the Roman communion) and cannot bear the weighty, haunting music to be varied. He is not alone. All over the south country, from Wallingford to Trafalgar Square, I have seen notices outside churches bearing the magic or holy number ...”

“... he wanted his characters to be subject to the same moral conditions – you couldn’t say that of Evelyn Waugh – appearing and disappearing via the same mirrors and trapdoors. There are novelists who can only fully realise characters who are in some strong degree like themselves, characters they expect the reader will naturally approve of, or instantly ...”

“... with copious quantities of alcohol. This was the era of the journalistic raconteur, satirised by Evelyn Waugh in Scoop forty years earlier, whose favoured sagas involved the finagling of expenses. A Newsweek colleague of mine used to say: ‘I love doing expenses. It’s the only chance I get to write fiction.’ My favourite tale, which I recall ...”

“... and label them like dead butterflies in a display case. Many of the most successful satirists – Evelyn Waugh, even dry old Orwell – had a streak of madness and self-contradiction within them which might lead them to answer the question ‘What are you trying to do?’ with something like ‘I’m trying to beat you all up and beat myself up ...”

“... a recent convert, can write such leaden sentences as: ‘In the following decades the novels of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene would epitomise the realism of 20th-century Catholic literature. In the meantime, Chesterton was content to let Baring and a handful of others practise the art of the Catholic novel while he concentrated on controversy.’ This ...”

“... the corpse but misguidedly tried to protect their feelings by keeping silent about the details. Evelyn Waugh has been read, so the reports only use the phrase ‘loved one’ twice to describe the deceased. They agree that the law is a mess, and will need changing to bring it into line, so that ‘every satisfaction’ is ‘afforded’, in the words ...”

“... is for instance death to the American tongue.’ Manner and class, bedevilling our screens with Evelyn Waugh revisions and soapy TV scrapings from the heritage catalogue (country houses, clothes that fit too well), is no part of Raworth’s remit. He’s all detail, all darting quickness. Drainpipe trousers, winklepickers and the sod-you edge of the ...”

“... and that the two groups chose to keep apart out of innate tact. At such moments, all this sub-Waugh attitudinising falls into place as part of a wider, less amiable cultural tendency that takes our attention away from the actual ‘experience of class’. Consider Scruton’s discussion of the ‘ineffable charm’ of the public schools (an Old Wycombist ...”

“... less interested in the distant past of his obscure finger of the Peloponnese than in its present; Evelyn Waugh set out for the Horn and the Levant as a mercenary for Northcliffe, but who imagines he ceased to observe or write as a novelist? In the postwar period, the enormous growth of the media and the dwindling number of authors with ‘independent ...”

“... Graham an exhibition on very slender evidence. As an undergraduate, he was the contemporary of Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Harold Acton and other gilded youths who expected the world to pay attention to them. As the editor of Oxford Outlook, he asked his father to try to persuade their Berkhamsted neighbour, the eminent historian G.M. Trevelyan, to ...”

“... and fumes from coal (‘sea-coal’) burned in breweries, bakeries and glass foundries. John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, or, the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated (1661) dismissed the idea that domestic hearths had much to do with it – probably correctly at the time.Evelyn wrote about ‘Clowds of ...”

“... he can go out shooting with me’. (Elsewhere, another angry gentleman of the period, Evelyn Waugh, had waited for his children to be of an age to converse with him, before bestowing an interest.) The household shot, and it rode, to hounds and in all directions, but Ronald Fraser had no love for horses. The poor little rich boy was looked ...”

“... hallucinations and paranoid ‘involuntary word-games’, turns out to have been the sound of Evelyn Waugh, who was simultaneously, outside the range of Spark’s awareness, converting his own similarly hallucinatory experience into The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Any sudden access of words – Mrs Hawkins’s ‘pisseur de copie’ in A Far Cry from ...”