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“... 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 ...”

“... out of the modernist mainstream. His work was not, Soden points out, so different in its themes. Evelyn Waugh’s take on the Bright Young Things, Vile Bodies, was exactly contemporary with Private Lives. Auden and Isherwood made use of revue, music hall and jazz. Virginia Woolf explored bisexuality in her life and work. Woolf did develop a fragile and ...”

“... for Mac-Neice’s cool aloofness (when he wasn’t ‘egregiously cheeky’), and for Evelyn Waugh’s dislike of everything Cunningham dislikes (‘Auden deserved Waugh’s chidings. So did Waugh’). Yet even the writers who enjoy intermittent praise in this book must ...”

“... invented a spy-ring. To populate it, he says, he invented characters and gave them names from Evelyn Waugh novels. In filling out his ‘bald and unconvincing narrative’, Cooper was drawing on the cultural resources available to a public school-educated, middle-class Englishman. To Cooper’s surprise, his interrogators found his invented account ...”

“... to be a listener and a bad one to be a talker, so I’d followed that ethos to the letter. It was Evelyn Waugh who said that when a writer is born into a family the family is over. And why would it be any different when a second family comes to call? Julian wanted a brother, a friend, a PR guru, a chief of staff, a speechwriter, and he wanted that person ...”