“... as does simple perversity; and they may affect to love the most overlooked of their progeny. Thus Evelyn Waugh used to claim that his favourite novel was Helena. Though Salammbô was a greater financial and social success than Madame Bovary – it became a meme, and the inspiration for ballgowns – most knew that Flaubert’s first novel was his ...”

“... if I’m not joggled,’ he may be saying to some anxious lady. There is a suggestion of the later Evelyn Waugh. Still, though the method can produce boss shots, the sturdy indifference to received opinion, the basic earnestness and the eye open to the whole scene, allow her to come out with important judgments. Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, as it now ...”

“... with this process: the stubby, solid figure, with its big head and staring eyes, as though Evelyn Waugh had been reincarnated as a Roundhead; the dark three-piece suit, an interposing formality signalling that ceremony is a proper thing to stand on; the shadowed, book-lined interiors in which he sits, robed and ready to pass judgment. It is all ...”

“... responsible, but I think it has played a part in the visible degradation of British journalism. Evelyn Waugh is beginning to look like a master of understatement. The popular press has gone, someone said, from gutter to sewer. And too many newspapers cover political life largely as transmission belts for unexamined assertions by politicians. In such ...”

“... egalitarian spirit, when a highpoint of homogeneity became a moment of social change. Evelyn Waugh, he claims, was demobbed because of fears he would be shot by the men under his command. And when Churchill, visiting down-at-heel Camberwell during the Blitz, made a speech that concluded with the words ‘We can take it,’ a heroic voice ...”

“... 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 might appear to ...”

“... was about Randolph Churchill having a tumour removed and the tumour turning out to be benign and Evelyn Waugh saying that they had removed the only part of Randolph that wasn’t malignant. The doctor laughed. He seemed like a good-humoured guy. He checked that I would be able to inject myself in the stomach every night with some blood-thinning ...”

“... nobleman. Finally she left him, and went off with ‘a dark horse-coper named Woodman’. Evelyn Waugh heard a fictional echo – ‘Lady Chatterley in every detail’ – although Channon thought it more Far from the Madding Crowd: ‘She is Bathsheba, Sergeant Frank Troy, Mr Woodman.’In 1938, Honor’s sister Patricia married another Tory ...”

“... state have done so much for the casting of a fiction. Each is a little like that rural innocent of Evelyn Waugh’s who was sent to Africa with his forked sticks in order to be a gentleman of the press: Kit even manages a scoop. The other side is a mixed cabal consisting of a former New Labour bruiser, a suave fixer of wars and murders, and an evangelical ...”

“... from each other as they could be, yet none precisely a realist. Smaller in scale, Amis is – like Evelyn Waugh, in some respects an influence on him – a comedian, a comic artist: yet neither fails to be a novelist. The Old Devils in particular shows what very various elements can get together to make up the idiosyncratic English novel. If it lacks the ...”

“... world.’ Thesiger was fairly consistent in his contempt for fellow authors. He hated Evelyn Waugh’s account of Abyssinia (though he conceded that Waugh was a good stylist). He was rude about Freya Stark and Lesley Blanch, and he rowed with Joy Adamson. He described Jan Morris’s Sultan in Oman as ...”

“... something more vigorous, too, in the anti-romantic tone of the novels – which they shared with Evelyn Waugh’s novels, though in a minor key. Pamela Flitton comes to mind as an ATS driver at the War Office, with her ‘Stuff the Ambassador’, or the picture of her, ‘standing by the car, surveying the street with her usual look of hatred and ...”

“... a self-punishing novel, putting every obstacle in the way of detachment; it has a resemblance to Evelyn Waugh’s experiment with himself in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Zuckerman is a writer living out the consequences of the success and scandal of a novel sounding very like Portnoy’s Complaint. In his early, struggling days he was the hero of ...”

“... upper-class English life published in the decades after the war – Dance to the Music of Time or Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour. They combine a distinctive and exotic subject – appalling posh people – with a universal theme: families, and whether people can transcend their origins (answer: no). But where you might expect such a series to be ...”

“... in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he was 62; Graham Greene, who survived him by a quarter of a century, received two thousand from Norman Sherry. These are huge tomes. Even such a minuscule figure as Kingsley Amis has been encased in an obese 995 pages from ...”