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“... Selassie, whom he had already encountered as Ras Tafari. There are sharp words for a fellow guest. Evelyn Waugh, of whom he had not then heard, was ‘blind to the historical significance of the occasion, impercipient of this last manifestation of Abyssinia’s traditional pageantry’. He was also contemptuous of the British minister for not inviting him ...”

“... not-at-all-suppressed boredom and a cigarette holder. The boredom was partly a generational thing. Evelyn Waugh, b. 1903; Graham Greene, b. 1904; Cyril Connolly, b. 1903; Ian Fleming, b. 1908. These Englishmen came from a similar class background, and had writing careers which, from the outside at least, seemed characterised by brilliant success. They ...”

“... are very few who are definitely “better”.’ She also has to admit that Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh are more brilliant than herself; she is not brilliant, she emphatically tells us, and only wishes ‘to see straight and put it down right’ (‘tell it like it is,’ they were to say in the Sixties); who wants to be brilliant? She thinks it ...”

“... real Victorian moral tradition. Amis is certainly one of those creators of a fictional world – Evelyn Waugh and Powell himself being other cases – whose worlds are funny and compelling to read about but would, the reader can comfortably feel, be most disagreeable to have a part in. This simple reader/novelist contract seems no longer relevant ...”

“... is Margaret FitzHerbert’s first book. A granddaughter of her subject, the second daughter of Evelyn Waugh, she has written a most discriminating, sure-footed and non-partisan biography, with a good sense of period. She is not out to distribute praise or blame. She mentions, dead-pan, such oddities as Herbert’s interest in the financial ...”

“... time for life-long exile’. It is a novel, you might say, bred out of Ford Madox Ford, Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, and is by no means without interest. It does not help, though, to say, as Michael Holroyd seems to, that in it autobiography has been imaginatively transmuted into fiction – for that is true of almost any novel. Its ...”

“... of Nancy Cunard’. For glimpses of the rest of her see Wyndham Lewis, Richard Aldington (twice), Evelyn Waugh, Michael Arlen and Aldous Huxley. As one might anticipate, Nancy Cunard is a favourite with Amos: often copied, and unfailingly good copy. Indeed, he finds it hard to mention her without throwing in a curious or vulgar little footnote: ‘Nancy ...”

“... to be accompanied by some fatuous judgments on other writers: E.M. Forster ‘unintelligent’, Evelyn Waugh ‘sugary’, Jane Austen ‘morally ambivalent’. There is also a stray facile comment on the work of Eric Quayle in exposing Scott’s financial sharp practice: ‘unconvincing’. It may not have convinced Mr Wilson, but to many admirers of ...”

“... old hand began to spill the sort of not-so-plain tales from the hills which would have delighted Evelyn Waugh: there had been a one-legged sportsman who took a piano stool into the marshes on duck shoots, there was a bossy lady called Mrs Thatcher, and so forth. Srinagar offered ‘the real tomb of Jesus’, but made only half-hearted efforts to exploit ...”

“... is, in effect, a prolonged fantasy of imposed celibacy. Whether they were lovers or not (Evelyn Waugh took it that plain, ageing Rose must have been ‘hallucinating’), there is a general air of cold fish about all Macaulay’s work, as Virginia Woolf noted of the successful 1920 novel, Potterism: ‘Rose, judging from her works, is a Eunuch ...”

“... are entertainingly described. There are good jokes – Pyat writes to what he assumes to be Miss Evelyn Waugh, although when met ‘she was permanently dressing as a man and had grown plumply repulsive.’ But the man himself is the very model of a pub bore, the kind of man one is eager to get away from and never see again, and these are Pyat’s ...”

“... similar, though an inclination towards pastiche runs through them all. The Grotesque is a brittle, Evelyn Waugh-inflected satire. Dr Haggard’s Disease is a macabre reworking of The End of the Affair. His last novel, Martha Peake (2000), is a very enjoyable hybrid of Stevenson and Defoe, with generous helpings of American Revolutionary history. But they ...”

“... to pad out tome after fresh tome on Graham Greene, or George Orwell, or P.G. Wodehouse, or Evelyn Waugh, or Bernard Shaw, or Cyril Connolly? Must we prepare our shelves for yet another cache of letters, stumbled across like Dead Sea scrolls, every decade? If so, will they, too, rank high with biographers as first-hand testimony to what the subject ...”

“... conflicting subjects, Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots; while the zealous Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh, moving from the novel to a hagiography of Edmund Campion, produced a horrifying portrait of the persecuting queen. Equally, the rise of gender studies has inevitably drawn Elizabeth into the stormy seas of women’s history. A mere historian ...”

“... selects a Puligny-Montrachet to wash down his Quenelles d’Aiglefin Monte-Carlo, he could be Evelyn Waugh giving the full treatment to some American hanger-on. What was a young married man doing anywhere near the Connaught? Naipaul’s conversation on this occasion is admirable, too. Rather than denouncing Robert Lowell’s poetry as bogus (‘His ...”