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“... is a powerful technique in fiction, more so than readers consciously notice. Christopher Sykes once asked his good friend Evelyn Waugh how it was that one of his earlier novels, apparently light and humorous, had an undertow of melancholy. Waugh said he had done it by keeping the weather in the book grey and rainy.) One of my favourites is My Friend ...”

“... invoke your innate awfulness as a mitigating factor, but it is one which, according to Christopher Sykes, Waugh’s friends would often hear. Perhaps the most chilling story, because its cruelty is so frivolous, is one told by his son Auberon. After long war years of rationing and scarcity, three bananas arrived at the Waugh household: they were taken to the ...”

“... longer than him to learn it.’ Was this what led him to romanticise failure – the failure of Charles Ryder to get religion or to get Julia, the failure of Guy Crouchback to make his fellow officers see what the war was really about?What is it, then, that makes Waugh a deviant in the history of our culture? Not, surely, that he was a man of the Right, an ...”

“... England from Munich in 1868, when Sickert was eight). He already shared Degas’s admiration for Charles Keene, an illustrator for Punch whom he later described as ‘the greatest English artist of the 19th century’. His apprenticeship preparing Whistler’s etchings, and his experiments in the same field, must have further refined his draughtsmanship. It ...”