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“... as author. Early novels flopped. There was no sudden success like that of his fellow adventurer Evelyn Waugh. One suspects that before the formula was perfected the public just didn’t believe a word of what he wrote: certainly not in the case of The Man Within and Rumour at Nightfall. His admiration for Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford didn’t ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the worst-invented character to be found in the author’s work’; it is the process that turned Evelyn Waugh into Gilbert Pinfold. Though of course, the transformation is never complete, and never succeeds in fully abolishing the old, vestigial, shyer and more likeable self – if it did, it would be less painful. (Gilbert Pinfold could not have ...”

“... to Oxford they could have settled for a collar-up shuffle down Farm Street and a bit part in the Evelyn Waugh biographies. The primary task of the Cambridge poet is to find a language that respects this inheritance: as resistant as code, as the markings on a Sumerian clay tablet. A language justified in its paranoia. The poems we listen to in King’s ...”

“... Isherwood, Heard, Huxley, St-John Perse, Gilbert Ryle, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh. Some, including Eliot and Huxley, are evoked at length; others come to rest in a marvellous single image. Edith Sitwell’s eyes are ‘heavily underpencilled in blue, like the woad dye of an early Briton warrior’. Isherwood and Don ...”

“... but now unfashionable Existentialist novels of Sartre and Camus. Despite the echoes of Evelyn Waugh, of Beckett, of Larkin and Alan Bennett, these seem to me to be the real precursors of Mr Phillips. Lanchester’s new novel, in other words, is that hitherto unthinkable, almost absurd thing, a great English Existentialist novel. Nostalgic ...”

“... for her much, her egoism is as tiresome and her appearance about as unprepossessing as my own.’ Evelyn Waugh being ‘our valued friend’, ‘it amused me to hear Peter laughing at Evelyn’s “provincial little Arnold Bennett arriviste appearance”.’ If Chelsea (and Oxford) might be at odds with Bloomsbury (and ...”