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“... entrance examinations and ends up reading English at Hertford College, ‘where Jonathan Swift and Evelyn Waugh had once been students’. ‘I seldom speak of it,’ he confesses, ‘because to say “When I was at Oxford ...” sounds suspect even to me, like the opening of one of my father’s bullshit stories.’ At Oxford, Wolff has a moment of ...”

“... to him, he had given W.H. Auden his first reading of The Waste Land; had been the only witness as Evelyn Waugh was ‘received’ into Holy Mother Church; had been saluted by Edith Sitwell as the hope of English poetry; had been anointed as the diabolic successor to Aleister Crowley; had nearly interested John Betjeman in socialism and A.J.P. Taylor in ...”

“... is the piece he wrote in 1965 for the New Yorker, ostensibly a review of autobiographies by Evelyn Waugh and Leonard Woolf. On the pretext that ‘no one can read an autobiography which describes a time, a country, a class familiar to him without starting to compose his own,’ Auden turned this into an 11,000-word comparison of his and their ...”

“... She was credited with transforming the national diet and she gave cookery a place in high culture. Evelyn Waugh admired her writing and she was praised, often wildly overpraised, as an author. Lisa Chaney goes so far as to describe her as a highly complex and driven artist. David also managed to make domestic cookery glamorous. No comfortable Mrs ...”

“... Underground from McKnight Kauffer, John Piper and others. Piper contributed to the Review, as did Evelyn Waugh (one of the few people Lancaster positively disliked), Osbert Sitwell and Penelope Chetwode, whom Betjeman later married. With Lancaster’s first wife, the artist Karen Harris, they made a natural foursome, Karen’s family being well up to the ...”

“... read about the Jungman sisters, who in their youth were Bright Young Things and contemporaries of Evelyn Waugh. In later life they turned reclusive, stockpiled the newspaper (the Telegraph, I suspect), reading one a day still but years behind the times. What are generally called ‘bygones’ make a brief appearance in the play, as they regularly do in ...”

“... her quite fabulously dull husband – ‘looked very pretty in his black shirt,’ she wrote to Evelyn Waugh years later, ‘but we were younger and high-spirited then, and didn’t know about Buchenwald.’ Fans of Nancy Mitford have her novels, her journalism, her delightfully spiteful biographies and two vast volumes of correspondence to sustain ...”

“... to fight shy of being a war artist.War artists’ art, like the war novels of Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, was stronger on boredom, home-front detail and character than adventure and horror. Nobody expected a Guernica – or if they did they didn’t get one. No Goya or Otto Dix emerged – the drawings Ronald Searle made in a Japanese prison camp ...”

“... of children, was incredible, Wilson affirmed that she was drawn from the life, and congratulated Evelyn Waugh on understanding that. He did a lot of drawing from the life, and the models sometimes recognised themselves. Not all were weird or wild: I was surprised to read that Christopher Morris, later a friendly colleague of mine, correctly identified ...”

“... occasion “make nipples less fantastic.” ’ During the last few months, in a development Evelyn Waugh would have hesitated to invent, the Sun’s proprietor has reportedly undergone a religous conversion, and so Page Three isn’t there any more – it’s been moved to page seven, where God presumably minds it much less. Television was another ...”

“... unseating the Kaiser. Nancy Mitford said it was one of the very best novels she had ever read and Evelyn Waugh ‘saluted a new artist’. Proustian in its preoccupation with money and rank, it has the charm of the dying Europe in which it is set: a world where the very rich, when they went to take the cure, travelled in a private railway carriage and ...”

“... with any regularity: matching in popularity ... the histories of Arthur Bryant and the novels of Evelyn Waugh.’ Around the same time, Edith too was hitting the jackpot with her full-hearted Fanfare for Elizabeth. And when Cyril Connolly – himself a somewhat Osbertish phenomenon, without the wealth – devoted a 1947 number of Horizon to persuading ...”

“... of Hollywood gossip. Similarly, he claimed to be fluent in almost every European language, though Evelyn Waugh noted that all he could really do was parrot a few well rehearsed little speeches and that it was a relief when it stopped. Like his immediate predecessors, he stressed the cult of Mary. Since there was no scriptural basis for the Virgin’s ...”

“... of her voice. This ventriloquial quality (something she does share with another Catholic novelist, Evelyn Waugh) may be another reason why she is not classed with the heavies. It is always, in the end, a monologue we are attending to. The recovery of Bakhtin’s work, and especially of his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics,* has, I suppose, been a boon ...”

“... in them may indeed give its particular bite and personality to his fantasy, as in the case of Evelyn Waugh, or it may impose limitations on his sense of reality, as Furbank feels it does in the case of Meredith and Thackeray. (There is even something self-limiting about Tom Jones as a novel – for the same kind of reason?) As Furbank points out, the ...”