“... in everyday life as a cross between a musical-comedy country squire and a mad colonel from an Evelyn Waugh novel. He was also a brilliant journalist whose unforeseeable editorial decisions were right, 98 per cent of the time. And when he ceased to be right, with the disastrous ‘Man-Plan’ issues of the early Seventies, he quit. For ever. Now it ...”

“... the ‘private’ has been formed by, say, the diaries of Roger Casement, or even the diaries of Evelyn Waugh, will be disappointed. There are no secrets or scandals here, nothing to raise a blush or occasion any reassessment of Haggard’s character or achievement. His diaries, all 22 volumes and two million words of them, have been known for years and ...”

“... selects a Puligny-Montrachet to wash down his Quenelles d’Aiglefin Monte-Carlo, he could be Evelyn Waugh giving the full treatment to some American hanger-on. What was a young married man doing anywhere near the Connaught? Naipaul’s conversation on this occasion is admirable, too. Rather than denouncing Robert Lowell’s poetry as bogus (‘His ...”

“... a hilarious sort of squawking Greek chorus running through the book, in the shape of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford’s gleeful letters to each other commenting on the life and love affairs of the circle. After Taylor’s painstaking examinations of his characters’ changes of mind and heart, it’s pleasing to have these goings-on ...”

“... Evelyn Waugh was characteristically unimpressed by the remains of the prehistoric Minoan palace at Knossos and its famous decoration. His 1930 travelogue, Labels, contains a memorable account of his disappointment, not so much at the excavation site itself (‘where,’ he writes archly, ‘Sir Arthur Evans … is rebuilding the palace’) but at its collection of prize paintings and sculpture, which had been removed to the museum in Heraklion ...”

“... climate of the post-conciliar Church it does not excite as much comment as formerly. His friend Evelyn Waugh, a much more orthodox and ‘loyal’ Catholic, was dismayed by A Burnt-Out Case when it appeared in 1961. ‘I don’t think you can blame people who read the book as a recantation of faith.’ Waugh wrote to ...”

“... Chisholm and Davie a character out of at least four books: novels by Arnold Bennett, Rebecca West, Evelyn Waugh and William Gerhardie. The friendship with Bennett occasioned splendidly dry comments in the novelist’s journals: ‘Max B lunched with me yesterday. Asked “What about the Tory Party?” he said: “A is an idiot, B has sciatica, C is ...”

“... have guessed, includes a Nancy Mitford piece, ‘Why is a debutante?’ (1930), in the mood of Evelyn Waugh. And the Countess of Oxford and Asquith on ‘Changes I have seen’ (1935): she didn’t really see any, because anything of consequence happened inside her own front door. She had ‘an ardent desire to know everyone of interest and ...”

“... thinly re-created. There seems none of the ‘excitement with place’, for instance, that worked Evelyn Waugh up to his refugee-in-America satire, The Loved One. Sally Emerson’s The Listeners shapes up as if it is going to be a rather conventional and thoroughly English novel of the kind Malcolm Bradbury describes as chronicling the female orgasm in ...”

“... outer world. Foreigners who happened to enter Paraguay remained there for ever, like characters in Evelyn Waugh. El Supremo cloaked his iron chauvinism with a populist mantle. His introverted republic was by necessity autarchic, it created a subsistence economy, it favoured mob rule (la chusma), attacked and weakened the Church: yet it finally protected ...”

“... of John Stuart Mill in its dealings with Lukacs. And when therefore John Paul II – who, like Evelyn Waugh, as Randolph Churchill remarked to an earlier Pope, is himself a Roman Catholic – did not respond to Dr Küng’s appeals against the requirement that he no longer teach as a Catholic theologian, he did only what rational consistency ...”

“... alongside better-known historians, and figures such as Whitehead, Toynbee, Eliot, Churchill and Evelyn Waugh. ‘It was not until it began to be said in Jesus that Peterhouse was willing to get rid of Knowles that Butterfield was in a position to persuade Vellacott that Peterhouse had a duty to keep him,’ writes Cowling with relish, and we know where ...”

“... beauty of the doctrine and the regulated orderliness of the Catholic life if properly lived. Like Evelyn Waugh, she saw a daily beauty in the lives of well-born cradle Catholics – a style she could not emulate. Her Schwärmerei was compounded of religious aspiration, romance and snobbery. All the same, she understood what Catholicism was about. Pascal ...”

“... He slips up oddly when he describes a recruit to Coward’s entourage as having been ‘ADC to Evelyn Waugh’ in the Royal Marines. Many expected witticisms turn up, though not the possibly apocryphal description of the Sit-wells as ‘two wise acres and a cow’. The footnotes are often good value. One of them quotes a last verse of ‘Mad about the ...”

“... essential foolishness he failed to detect, Professor Carey happily classified Brian Howard and Evelyn Waugh as twin exemplars of a decayed ruling class. Any attitude which can find two such men even remotely similar is worthy of study in itself. It takes no great predictive power to see that in the long term there will be no such thing as a social ...”