I fear that, if 'Vile Bodies' is typical of his work, I shall have to add Evelyn Waugh to the list of critically acclaimed and popular writers whom I simply can't get to grips with. (EM Forster and Charles Dickens are already on that list.) 'Vile Bodies' is a dull and very disappointing book. Fir...
“There was a Gothic pavilion where by long habit Freddy often became amorous; he did become amorous” (13).“Often, in Paris, Lady Seal had been proud that her people had never fallen to the habit of naming streets after their feats of arms; that was suitable enough for the short-lived and purely p...
An improbable—though hilarious—foray into Afghanistan by two Brits in 1956.After a bad day at the office, the then 36-year-old London fashion salesman decides to quit his job, kiss goodbye his wife and children, and mount an ill-conceived exploration of mountainous Afghani hinterlands with an ecc...
I just finished rereading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, a book I pick up every couple of years or so. This time I read it because of the new movie version movie (the one with Emma Thompson as the Lady Marchmain Flyte). As a critic, I get to see a pre-screening of the new movie on Tuesday...
BLACK MISCHIEFWaugh’s third novel is a departure from his first two classic satires of British society. For one thing, Black Mischief is largely set on the fictional East African island nation of Azania, although most of the characters are Brits. Second, Waugh actually has a plot that can be neat...
http://theprettygoodgatsby.wordpress...."Can I help you in any way?""I came to arrange about a funeral.""Is it for yourself?"This is a year of firsts for me as far as literature goes. I've finally read a Goosebumps book, sat down with one of chick-lit's heavy hitters, and now I have an Evelyn Wau...
"It seems to me sometimes that Nature, like a lazy author, will round off abruptly into a short story what she obviously intended to be the opening of a novel."So writes Evelyn Waugh at the start of part 4 of "A House of Gentlefolks", one of many short stories in this wonderful book that do just ...
I don’t know why I thought this was going to be a comedy, but I did think that when I started. The problem might have been the title, the clear allusion to Eliot’s The Waste Land and Other Poems - you can only really be either ponderous or funny if you allude to The Waste Land and I just suspec...
I never thought I would write a negative review of a novel by Evelyn Waugh. Evelyn Waugh is one of my top two or three favorite authors, and "The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold," until last week, was the last of his novels that I had not read (including his unfinished novel, "Work Suspended"). I was d...
This trilogy spanning World War II, based in part on Evelyn Waugh's own experiences as an army officer, is the author's surpassing achievement as a novelist. Its central character is Guy Crouchback, head of an ancient but decayed Catholic family, who at first discovers new purpose in the challeng...
The listless passengers, British and American, all men, of all services and all of lowly rank, stirred and buckled themselves to the metal benches. The journey by way of Gibraltar and North Africa had been tedious and protracted by unexplained delays. It was now late afternoon and they had had no...
Chaos came from without in sudden, unexplained commands and cancellations; order grew from within as company, battalion and brigade each rearranged itself for the new unexpected task. They were so busy in those weeks with their own homebuilding, repairing, rearranging, improvising, that the great...