“... whose pilots were safe a continent away, was already present in wartime London. Ziegler quotes Evelyn Waugh: ‘No enemy was risking his life up there. It was as impersonal as a plague, as though the city was infested with enormous, venomous insects.’Eight decades separate the V-1 from the delta-winged Shahed-136, the Iranian suicide drone being ...”

“... the Oxford set, the Children of the Sun, the Brideshead generation, especially Brian Howard and Evelyn Waugh, who is given special status as an important Deviant from Our Age; and also about Cambridge – about the Spies, of course, who escape being described as Deviant, but also about certain slightly less notorious gentlemen. There was, for ...”

“... a reviewer is that of the gruff history master. He will open a review, as if telling the boys, ‘Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903,’ ‘Alice James, born 1848, was the only sister of Henry James.’ And these decent and helpful conventions (now hopelessly out of date – a startling number of the intelligent young now know no history at all) will ...”

“... The disillusionment of the war, and the brutal treatment of current specimens of the gentry by Evelyn Waugh and others, had sent their stock very low indeed. The Fountain was the ideal novel for the thoughtful middle class because it unexpectedly reinstated an ideal of gentlemanliness, going with tranquillity and inner confidence, which it portrayed ...”

“... style that the secret lies, the style of which Graham Greene said: ‘After the death of Evelyn Waugh, Narayan is the stylist I most admire.’ Economy is, of course, its salient feature: ‘While writing, I prefer to keep such details to a minimum in order to save my readers the bother of skipping. Also, I have a habit of pruning and trimming ...”

“... life of her own, with quite enough excitement and confusion and loose ends to be going on with. Evelyn Waugh, revealingly, found this book infuriating; prewar he’d praised Green, but while he confined himself to complaining fussily to his face about some of the social detail in Loving – surely if these were really gentry they wouldn’t be renting ...”

“... were reading. Lera: Françoise Sagan, Iris Murdoch, Susan Hill, John Updike (‘pointless’), Evelyn Waugh (‘black and unreadable’), Yuri Trifonov, the Kyrgyz author Chinghiz Aitmatov, books on yoga. Harold: mostly 19th-century classics, but also ‘one modern book a week’. The families exchanged presents: from England to Moldavia, maternity ...”

“... would write comic novels. Precedents exist in the work of Catholic or Anglo-Catholic writers like Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark and A.N. Wilson. The greater the distance from which human life is seen, the more like a certain kind of black comedy it tends to look. Updike has praised the ‘sublime hard-heartedness’ of ...”

“... sturdy virtue, opined that ‘the failures of overwork are fewer than the failures of idleness.’ Evelyn Waugh, on the whole in kindly mood, reported to Diana Cooper in Paris that Connolly was ‘wholly absurd in his serious moments, which are becoming more and more frequent ... he sees himself as a Public Relations Officer for Literature’, but ‘he ...”

“... guns. You would get the idea, listening to these jerks, that the United States was already (as Evelyn Waugh said about Britain under Labour in 1945) ‘an occupied country’. But the gun-freaks and white supremo types have been organising, and using deadly force, for longer than the right-wing bigmouths have had corporate sponsorship of the air. In ...”

“... in different directions on Sunday morning. It was certainly not intellectual. In his letters to Evelyn Waugh he expresses deep gratitude for his friend’s vigorous attempts to explain the Catholic position to him, but he resists Waugh’s arguments mulishly rather than rationally. For Betjeman in this crisis the ...”

“... from their units to appear in films and then returned to take part in lesser heroics. Notoriously, Evelyn Waugh was given extended leave to write Brideshead Revisited, not so much with any idea of raising the nation’s morale as to get him out of the way; yet that book must have pulled in a tidy haul of dollars. In Occupied France the Germans’ idea had ...”

“... including among others Goya, Piranesi, Fuseli, William Shenstone, Byron, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Poppy Z. Brite and David Lynch. ‘Gothic’ is no doubt as variable in definition as it is in quality, but one can’t avoid the sense of a certain arbitrariness of selection. It is not so much that any obvious authors have been left out; it ...”

“... socks’ (Freud, I think), and put up with the ingrained anti-semitism of his chosen milieu. Evelyn Waugh called him that ‘terrible Yid . . . a jewish [sic] hanger-on . . . called “Freud”’ with ‘very long black side-whiskers and a thin nose’. Well obviously, Caroline was going to marry the man: she was wealthy (her unloving mother had ...”

“... began to be published, it turned out that as an undergraduate he had been one of the group round Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton. But whereas most of that charmed circle went down without taking a degree, Pares turned his back on all that, took a First in Greats and was elected a fellow of All Souls. Thirty years later in December 1954, ...”