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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the war. The two British novelists who went off to the war in mid-career in their mid-thirties, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, both wrote books about what they had seen at first hand, Waugh’s war being more overtly interesting (the Commandos, Crete, parachute training, Yugoslavia) but Powell’s more typical ...”

“... from the 16th century continue to haunt us and beguile us. On 21 May 1940 Nancy Mitford wrote to Evelyn Waugh on the subject:I used to masturbate whenever I thought about Lady Jane Grey so of course I thought about her constantly and even executed a fine watercolour of her on the scaffold, which my mother still has, framed, and in which Lady Jane and ...”

“... on cinema, Osbert Lancaster on art, Elizabeth Bowen on theatre, William Empson on travel ... and Evelyn Waugh on books. Waugh’s lambasting of the milquetoast Left sounds like mere common sense now, but by making truthfulness of prose his first criterion he achieved a permanently refreshing generosity of taste. With ...”

“... it try to think off-hand of six other great comic novelists in the entire history of fiction), Evelyn Waugh, even though he did from time to time get entangled in the golden folds of his ecclesiasticism. Recall his novel A Handful of Dust. He derides innocence as Bowen sighs maternally over it: but in the end poor, idealistic Tony Last’s Gothic ...”

“... his drawing attention to Goebbels’s Jesuit education. Here began his long-running vendetta with Evelyn Waugh. And the book abounded in withering generalisations about ‘the German national character’, views popular at the time but now embarrassing to read. Back in Oxford, he found that he was resented by some older dons. The bitchiest of all the ...”

“... As for his friend Gussie Fink-Nottle (whose name suggests Wodehouse learned a trick or two from Evelyn Waugh, for whom double-barrelled names tend to be for dimbos): no one with a name quite so obviously heedless could enjoy more than a walk-on part even in a 20th-century comedy. The more delicately named Jane Eyre is both the invisible element we ...”

“... one a day, happy in the knowledge that there would always be more. Years later when I first read Evelyn Waugh I had the same sense of discovery: here was a trove of books that was going to last. I wish I could say I felt the same about Dickens or Trollope or Proust even, but they seemed more of a labour than a prospect of delight. The butcher for whom ...”

“... Lancaster and Anthony Powell have both always let their participles dangle with abandon, and Evelyn Waugh, in the same chapter of his autobiography which tells us that only those who have studied Latin can write English, perpetrates at least one sentence whose past participle is so firmly attached to the wrong subject that there is no prising it ...”

“... had something of a Damascene conversion, having been as an undergraduate one of the circle around Evelyn Waugh, before turning his back on frivolity for academic life. But the spectacle – and it was a spectacle – of someone giving his last breath to the study of history taught me more than any of the tutorials and lectures that I had had at ...”

“... spirit.’ Coward was unusual among Maugham’s celebrity friends in not finding him intimidating. Evelyn Waugh didn’t either, but even he was made to feel uncomfortable after calling someone ‘a pansy with a stammer’ in Maugham’s presence. On another occasion, Maugham ‘gave him an icy stare’ as Ann Fleming – wife of Ian – chastised him ...”

“... fractious lesbian networks of New York, London and Paris’: from Eva to Allanah to Esther to Evelyn and then Eda, with many side projects and much criss-crossing, as Allanah darts off with Eda and then Jane, around the same time Esther is dallying with Joan, who is Eda’s ex. It’s a shame, perhaps, that Hastings’s attention is not especially attuned ...”