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“... Can it really be quite right for the Nation to be hunched over soap-operas attributed to Trollope, Evelyn Waugh and Galsworthy? And how shall we account for it? Part of the answer is that, some time during the century, a fatal discovery was made, with a resemblance to the adoption of monosodium glutamate in cookery. I mean the discovery that if, while ...”

“... Britain and Argentina are not at war, we are at conflict ... I am reading Scoop by a woman called Evelyn Waugh’). There are steps forward, too, into adult experience. He runs away from home, getting as far as Manchester, although his disappearance seems to cause no stir – nothing about him on the Six O’Clock News – and he has to write a card ...”

“... do without. Much that is laboriously established here could be understood better by a reading of Evelyn Waugh. The catalogue quotes the description of Poppet Green’s paintings from Put out more flags (‘Eighty years ago her subjects would have been knights in armour, ladies in wimples and distress; fifty years ago “nocturnes”; twenty years ago ...”

“... have often been clearly discernible. But in, say, The Untouchable, he absorbed the example of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell while still managing to speak in a distinctive voice of his own, and in The Book of Evidence (1989), he wrote a smart Nabokovian shocker about a murderous art thief that wasn’t distractingly derivative. The prevailing mode ...”

“... her as he had been before. Only one person seems to have found Duff Cooper ‘intolerable’ – Evelyn Waugh. The reasons could be interesting. The novelist was, after all, dedicated to a showing-up of the proprieties and to what amounts, in a way, to a sadistic hatred of them. In A Handful of Dust they are all tossed upside down: Tony Last is ...”

“... more roast-beef retinue of affected acolytes. He displayed none of the condescension with which Waugh, for example, approached Anglo-American locutions, and he never scorned to lard his discourse with terms like ‘Rannygazoo’, ‘Hornswoggle’ and ‘Put on dog’.Phelps earns his keep by faithfully tracking these entries (many of which went straight ...”

“... at Oxford; he takes tea with Ottoline Morrell and twits Virginia Woolf. Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh are London acquaintances. Picasso sketches his portrait, Hemingway is a fellow war correspondent, and Paris brings a meeting with James Joyce. His wartime boss at Naval Intelligence is, of course, Ian Fleming, who sends him to keep an eye on the ...”

“... for whom the scientist Julian Huxley was vulgar. At a certain party punishment was meted out by Evelyn Waugh. ‘I adored Evelyn but he had a very unkind side to him. He would keep on tormenting Julian Huxley. Though he was perfectly aware he was head of Unesco, he insisted on treating him as though he were still ...”

“... death. Again, the novel’s message is written in letters a foot high, like a Brechtian slogan. As Evelyn Waugh observed fifty years ago, the only problem the Americans haven’t been able to solve is death. But, in their can-do way, they keep trying – with cryogenics, channelling, tele-evangelism, liposuction, or whatever. Both of Thomson’s earlier ...”

“... been wider of the mark. His novel Far from the Madding War is in general a very thin production (Evelyn Waugh called it ‘the dullest book yet seen’), but there is something engaging in the agreement that its heroine, the bored daughter of a pompous Oxford don, reaches with Lord Fitzcricket, on the pain and impossibility of thinking. For what they ...”

“... but they also debase or make impure. But compared to other cosseted young people in satire – in Evelyn Waugh or Bret Easton Ellis, say – Ray doesn’t seem amoral and culpable so much as confused and pathetic. And Dunthorne remains surprisingly sympathetic to his plight, as he becomes an ‘unusual person’: the sort of person who stands at the ...”

“... it represented to an earlier generation of writers like E.M. Forster in The Longest Journey and Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited. It was now ‘a battleground of major ideas and ideologies’, a place which reflected – and in some degree resisted – the gale force of social and intellectual change. ‘In short,’ he concludes, ‘for me 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 ...”

“... there is no sign that great French or Russian literature sat alongside his editions of Hardy, Waugh and his favourite 19th-century Uranian poets. He hated abroad on principle, with the exception of Australia, which he visited in 1961 and celebrated for its wonderful light, architectural variations on a theme and resplendent wildlife. By 1960, when this ...”

“... scene re-enacted by farmers, eight thousand feet above the steaming seaboard.’ That is how Evelyn Waugh, who passed through Kenya at the beginning of the Thirties, was nostalgically to recall what he had found there. This sentence is not quoted in White Mischief, though Waugh’s name is invoked a couple of ...”