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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Evelyn Waugh
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(1902–66)
Novelist who viewed life with a balefully intolerant eye, and derived from it some of the best fictional comedy of the 20C. His books were closely derived from his own experiences. After Oxford he became briefly a schoolmaster, enabling him to write his first success, *Decline and Fall (1928). Visits to Africa as a journalist in the 1930s provided Black Mischief (1932) and *Scoop (1938). In all of these, as also in A *Handful of Dust (1934), he made good use of the brittle social life of London, of which he was himself a part (his satirical wit did not prevent his being also a snob). In 1930 he took a step of great importance in his personal life, converting to Roman Catholicism; his faith, his Oxford experiences and a fascination with the aristocracy all came together in a novel more solemn than his previous work, *Brideshead Revisited (1945).
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His wartime experiences as a soldier, including spells in Crete and Yugoslavia, led to three novels with a rich new cast of characters including Apthorpe, an officer obsessed with his portable lavatory or 'thunder box'; the individual books (Men at Arms 1952, Officers and Gentlemen 1955, Unconditional Surrender 1961) were issued together in 1962 under the title Sword of Honour. A visit to Hollywood in 1947 resulted in a macabre comedy on Californian burial customs (The Loved One 1948), and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) recounted, in barely fictional manner, some alarmingly self-revealing hallucinations which Waugh had suffered. By the end of his life his own personality – bigoted, reactionary and often spectacularly rude – had become almost as intriguing to the public as his perennially popular books.
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