Product Description

In his elegant, malicious prose, Evelyn Waugh satirizes British society as he saw it over three decades. From Work Suspended, where Plant, a writer of detective fiction, puts his incomplete novel in a drawer until such time as he can finish it (that is to say after the war), to Basil Seal Rides Again, in which the hero of Black Mischief defeats the children of the Sixties, these stories encompass much of the social milieu of the twentieth century. The volume also includes the fragment Charles Ryder's Schooldays, which sketches the background to the narrator of Brideshead Revisited.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9068 in Books
• Published on: 2000-12-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
Sometimes one detects a note of spoofing; the rest of the time this reads like rather far-fetched straight story. In either case, it is a none too flattering picture of the fringe of London's smart set, that set which thinks it achieves success by swapping mates and collecting admirers. The story of simple Tony, county gentleman of the old school, loving his ugly old home, adoring his wife and son; and of Brenda, accidentally discovering she is bored, and taking up a youth who lives by his slender wits and other people's invitations. She decides she must have a divorce, and Tony plays the conventional gentleman until he discovers that she is willing to pauperize him to buy herself her gigolo husband. Then the worm turns - and he is off to South America on a fantastic exploration, which has an even more fantastic finale in the Amazonian jungles. Not Waugh at his best. It falls a bit flat, much of the time. (Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author
Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903, second son of Arthur Waugh, publisher and literary critic, and brother of Alec Waugh, the popular novelist. He was educated at Lancing and Hertford College, Oxford, where he read Modern History. In 1928 he published his first work, a life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he travelled extensively in most parts of Europe, the Near East, Africa and tropical America, and published a number of travel books, including Labels (1930), Remote People, (1931), Ninety-Two Days (1934) and Waugh in Abyssinia (1936). In 1939 he was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, serving in the Middle East and in Yugoslavia. In 1942 he published Put Out More Flags and then in 1945 Brideshead Revisited. When the Going was Good and The Loved One preceded Men at Arms, which came out in 1952, the first volume of 'The Sword of Honour' trilogy, and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The other volumes, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender, followed in 1955 and 1961. He died in 1966.