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“... who believes in God the storyteller but who does not quite believe in the novel is the point Evelyn Waugh reached, but too late in his life for him to employ Spark’s modern subterfuges, so that The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, which so resembles Spark’s first novel, The Comforters, is an uneasy mixture of the real and the fantastic, while The ...”

“... and the high polish of St Aubyn’s own prose is almost indistinguishable from theirs. Evelyn Waugh is often invoked by reviewers of St Aubyn, but Jane Austen and Henry James might be equal influences, the Austen and James whose drawing-room performers are in some ways inseparable, stylistically at least, from the authors’ own ...”

“... labelled ‘The Wings of the Dove – A Modern Sequel’. You have only to glance through Evelyn Waugh’s Work Suspended and Other Stories to sense the very specific formal constraints which a novelist thinks appropriate to the short story. Waugh’s works most frequently have the crisp, clear and economical ...”

“... sit-ins and demos he saw in the London streets, the effect was disastrous, even blasphemous. As Evelyn Waugh observed, Wodehouse wrote of an unfading, green world, a world that simply wasn’t equipped to admit such brisk topicalities. In Pritchett, these time-warps into the present have a different point: you’re meant hardly to notice ...”

“... centuries of rapt description of the place, and particularly by certain writings of Thomas Hardy, Evelyn Waugh and Max Beerbohm, we know exactly what Oxford will be: unearthly bliss in the moment, and the object of sweet, aching nostalgia ever after.’ The novel appears to be about to deflate this notion of Oxford, treating it ...”

“... postwar years saw a premature slide into dotage, unsparingly described by Malcolm Muggeridge and Evelyn Waugh (‘Smell like fox’). He died in his Sussex home in 1953. Belloc was sometimes taxed with being the author of W.N. Ewer’s much anthologised squib: ‘How odd/Of God/To choose/The Jews.’ As a young man he had maintained Dreyfus guilty ...”

“... far down the Danube and into the ‘bloodthirsty’ Balkans. Later, John Buchan, Lawrence Durrell, Evelyn Waugh and Malcolm Bradbury were among those who tried their hand at brutal, gaudy Balkan Ruritanias. Literary ‘othering’, as teachers tell their classes, is a way of confirming your own society as ‘normal’ by heightening the aberrant weirdness ...”

“... You will listen in “stunned silence” to an “unearthly cry” or “a deafening roar”.’) Evelyn Waugh ‘wrote Brideshead Revisited with great speed, unfamiliar excitement, and a deep conviction of its excellence. Lasting schlock, the really good bad book, cannot be written otherwise.’ Malcolm Lowry is ‘a world-class liar’. The response to ...”

“... deprives them of the inadvertence of personality. Shortly after taking on Leavis, he had a go at Evelyn Waugh, accusing him of pretending to be a country gentleman rather than a writer. But of course his snobbishness, his Catholicism, his cruelty, his lack of decent ‘common man’ principles, were precisely what made ...”

“... Alan Judd’s novel if he wishes to discover what makes such a Colonel click – for outside of Evelyn Waugh I know of no caricature better observed or more moving, in spite of the comedy, than Colonel Cowrie, the memorable CO of No 1 Army Assault Commando (Airborne) during the battalion’s four-month stint in Northern Ireland. Feared, resented, even ...”

“... this was invariably wise. Less wise was his bid for publicity by importing Randolph Churchill and Evelyn Waugh, thus making it possible for Waugh to write a silly book about the war instead of a funny one. Yet who knows? The Partisans thought Randolph’s coming a welcome proof of Winston’s commitment to their ...”

“... Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William Shakespeare (although to be fair they despise the comedies and some of the history plays only). ‘It is easier, in ...”

“... that was characteristic of Spark from the beginning. As a result, she was often bracketed with Evelyn Waugh, who helped to promote her early novels and, according to Stannard, ‘told his children to protect her because she was a saint’. Posh Catholics, Tory anarchists and American anglophiles of related leanings still make up part of her ...”

“... soldier, the happy warrior. Paul Fussell will remember (for he quotes it in his book, Abroad) Evelyn Waugh’s sly description of a British Scoutmaster instructing Arab boys in Aden. The Indian novelist, R.K. Narayan, went to a school where ‘the great god was Baden-Powell and the principal recreation soccer’; the African playwright, Wole ...”

“... the Union, somebody asked her bullying husband for a divorce. Hurrah! Up in the Academy, Auberon Waugh, happy in the corner and cushioned by an IRA informer or two, bought a round of drinks and told me he’d just run a review of my first book. He said it wasn’t at all bad. ‘What, the review or the book?’ I asked. ‘The review,’ he said. ‘I ...”