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“... of facts: ‘It cannot have helped his self-confidence as a writer to have received a letter from Evelyn [his mother] just before Christmas warning him to remember what happened to rolling stones, and saying: “How much I would rejoice to hear of your success in life. Well! I shall just go on hoping.”’ Or: ‘Upset by the assassination of Gandhi at the ...”

“... responses of reviewers during a war. Suddenly, everyone becomes a prig. The TLS’s review of Evelyn Waugh’s Put out more flags, in 1942, typified the accent of the time: ‘in its rendering of those to whom the nation has to look for orders and guidance this book would be mischievous, but that it is unlikely to impress readers whose value to the ...”

“... in it together. The home front was as important and at times more dangerous than the battle front. Evelyn Waugh, who was in the Marines, found himself in Gibraltar in the autumn of 1940 at a loose end while he waited for a ship home and wrote of the change as something amounting to the roles of the sexes being reversed. Speculating that in London Yorke was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Voice any doubt except that. Below Karl Miller’s troubled conscience is an assurance worthy of John Knox, if rather more tolerant. His magazine reflects this – is, indeed, its embodiment. The LRB is the house magazine of the British intellectual élite. In the TLS they talk to the world. In the LRB they talk to each other. The dons let their hair ...”

“... and another three years till the first Dauphin arrived. According to The Untold Love Story by Evelyn Farr (‘Thoroughly enjoyable’, Catholic Herald; ‘Convincing’, the Tablet), Antoinette’s affair with Axel Fersen began in July 1783, and after this date the Queen became pregnant three times in three years. If Cadbury is going to rely on Vincent ...”

“... fractious lesbian networks of New York, London and Paris’: from Eva to Allanah to Esther to Evelyn and then Eda, with many side projects and much criss-crossing, as Allanah darts off with Eda and then Jane, around the same time Esther is dallying with Joan, who is Eda’s ex. It’s a shame, perhaps, that Hastings’s attention is not especially attuned ...”

“... Bushman. The English have naturally been quick to encourage such a notion. As one of Evelyn Waugh’s California-based Anglos put is, ‘we limeys have a peculiar position to keep up ... You never find an Englishman among the underdogs – except in England of course.’ Hitchens is undoubtedly right when he says that nothing has so reinforced ...”

“... enjoying his well-told story as an adventure yarn, a mystery. His narrator, John Baltasar, is an American journalist of Dutch descent. Travelling in Spain, during Franco’s regime, he got involved with terrorists, the Basque nationalist movement, and he feels guilty that he was too frightened to help them. Spain preys on his mind in ...”

“... two years later went over to Rome, to the quiet joy of her husband and the fervid satisfaction of Evelyn Waugh. It appears that church-going in Oxford had become an embarrassment, ‘with Frank alone turning to the right for St Aloysius and the rest of us’ – mother and three children – ‘turning left for St Paul’s’. This, she felt, was no way to ...”

“... ruined landscape round them. Lamenting the obliteration of English villages in A Little Learning, Evelyn Waugh wrote of ‘the grim cyclorama of spoliation which surrounds all English experience in this century’. ‘Any understanding of the immediate past,’ he said, ‘must be incomplete unless this huge deprivation of the quiet pleasures of the eye is ...”

“... and then, without bothering to consult the operational War Diaries, proceeds to spin out the John Connell-Correlli Barnett myth that Montgomery’s only contribution to the Desert arena was an incomprehensible uplift in morale. Monty’s plan for the defence of Alam Halfa, he declares, was inherited from Auchinleck: he neglects to mention that ...”

“... James Hewitt, Madam Vasso and the rest. Thus described by Kelley, the House of Windsor is part Evelyn Waugh, part Tom Sharpe, wholly Spitting Image. It is not so much that she descends to personalities as that she is incapable of rising above them. But this is scarcely to say anything new: ‘too little, too late’ has been the general verdict here in ...”

“... book. Stewart’s stint in neo-imperial government begins with all the makings of a spoof by Evelyn Waugh. Stewart spent January 2002 tramping across ravaged Afghanistan – the subject of his travelogue The Places In Between (2004) – after which a few months back on his ancestral Scottish turf was enough to revive a yen for adventure. When the ...”

“... of his typewriter. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are a staple of the National Curriculum, and Evelyn Waugh saw the possibility of comedy in the matter before anybody else, his William Boot a writer keen to make the rat-tat-tat of his typewriter fall into sync with the sound of gunfire over the hill. In America, a season in France or a period in the ...”