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“... is another figure to be let off with a caution, since – as for example in his treatment of Evelyn Waugh – ‘he is always capable of reining in his prejudices when something in him is stirred. Ultimately, Waugh’s snobbishness, his malice and his airs cease to matter because his novels are funny.’ It would ...”

“... are generally sighed in an elegiac, Chekhovian way, as if in commiseration with Tony Hancock or Evelyn Waugh: but I think that by ‘shrewd’ Shakespeare really meant shrewish, bitchy, catty, and by ‘unhappy’ he meant ill-omened, sick, really bad news. Alternative Comedians are often shrewd and unhappy in the older sense of the words. Anyone ...”

“... the compensation for his complete failure to be ‘a writer’. Young diarists usually show off. Evelyn Waugh records in 1956 that in the hope of understanding his son Auberon better ‘I read the diaries I kept at his age. I was appalled at the vulgarity and priggishness.’ The point, as Dorothy Wordsworth put it, is not ‘to quarrel with ...”

“... years old. After happening on Spark’s novel in proof while working on his own Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh has decided to write it a glowing testimonial, which he publishes in the Spectator: ‘It so happens that The Comforters came to me just as I had finished a story on a similar theme, and I was struck by how much more ambitious Miss Spark’s ...”

“... You must explain to me why Cyril wants Barbara,’ Evelyn Waugh wrote to Ann Fleming in September 1955, a year after Barbara Skelton’s marriage to Cyril Connolly had formally ended. ‘It’s not as though she were rich or a good housekeeper or the mother of his children.’ The following year Edmund Wilson asked Connolly, now two years into his divorce, why he didn’t get someone else ...”

“... as to how much of Courage Brown wrote. But maybe it is all his. I was put in mind of what Evelyn Waugh said about Churchill’s books, which, ‘though highly creditable, for a man with so much else to occupy him, do not really survive close attention’. Perry Anderson has glumly observed that ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ seem ...”

“... and attacking people makes good reading, which explains why certain people will always think Evelyn Waugh a genius and D.H. Lawrence a bore. For the devoted toff, effort and compassion are embarrassing in life and horrific on the printed page. The English upper orders learned from Oscar Wilde how to abhor earnestness and embrace triviality, but even ...”

“... they all said no. In their view people only went to Oxford to feel as if they were in a pornified Evelyn Waugh novel. If word got out that there were women in Piers Gav (as it was known) it would impact on ticket sales. The first thing to sort out was our names. There was a traditional stock of them, but as a reformist and moderniser I allowed the new ...”

“... In his battle with Trevor-Roper over matters of recusant history, the ‘convert-novelist’ Evelyn Waugh had offered some barbed advice to the young Oxford historian, whom Waugh presumed to have disgraced: the only ‘honourable course’ open to him was to ‘change his name and seek a livelihood at ...”

“... seemingly innocent. In another writer it might be malicious or mechanical or just for show. In Evelyn Waugh or Muriel Spark the same kind of observation would have about it a routine conscientiousness, a reminding of the reader what things are like, and a reassurance that the author’s outlook and style are perfectly fitted to do them justice. Pym is ...”

“... the word with some care) for a confidential tête-à-tête with an Ethiopian in whose high caste Evelyn Waugh would have rejoiced. Ras Asrata Kassa – as noble in physique and physiognomy as in his birth – had recently been dismissed as Governor-General of Eritrea, but he still retained his position as chairman of Ethiopia’s Crown Council. While ...”

“... while fashionable enough to be taken for granted, is both demanding and problematic. His heroine, Evelyn Tradescant, not long down from Newnham, finds herself drawn into the orbit of an elderly German, Baron Dietrich Gormann, known to his friends as ‘Theo’. This mysterious figure, once, some suspect, a Nazi sympathiser, but recently an Aldermaston ...”

“... solely for the Jizô cult. It left me wondering whether or not some Japanese reincarnation of Evelyn Waugh will one day get hold of it – but then I remembered how Juzo Itami’s film Osôshiki has already demonstrated that Japanese funerals provide more than enough material for satire. It is possible to see the Jizô cult as operating at the same ...”

“... illustrations, Betjeman’s poem ‘How to Get on in Society’ and a contribution from Evelyn Waugh) brought home the fact that the identification with the narrator, always a one-way traffic, was in this case disguising the social distance travelled. Lancaster’s contribution to our knowledge of what grander scenes than those we have ...”

“... to find a way into certain drawing-rooms of the nobility than to devote himself to literature’. Evelyn Waugh, who admitted that he hunted for ‘social reasons’, admired the aristocracy until he got close enough to realise it contained many tedious and ridiculous people. Proust was similarly disillusioned. It was not until the Dreyfus affair that he ...”