Product Description

Evelyn Waugh chose the name "Labels" for his first travel book because, he said, the places he visited were already "fully labelled" in people's minds. Yet even the most seasoned traveller could not fail to be inspired by his quintessentially English attitude and by his eloquent and frequently outrageous wit. From Europe to the Middle East and North Africa, from Egyptian porters and Italian priests to Maltese sailors and Moroccan merchants - as he cruises around the Mediterranean his pen cuts through the local colour to give an entertaining portrait of the Englishman abroad.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #173237 in Books
• Published on: 1999-06-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

About the Author
Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903 and was educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published 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). In 1945 he published Brideshead Revisited and he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1952 for Men at Arms. Evelyn Waugh died in 1966.

Customer Reviews

Fantastic
What a great book. Evelyn Waugh is more famous for books like Brideshead Revisited and A Handful of Dust, both of which are fairly tragic. He also wrote satirical, dark comedies like Scoop and The Loved One. This is a non-fiction book in which he attempts the travel genre, with in my view, stunning success. He ambles about using a cruise ship to transport him wherever his whims take him, commenting upon some of the usual sights you would expect, but also taking in local peculiarities, and more importantly people watching.
He has a wonderful turn of phrase and a delightfully irreverent approach to his commentary, he often addresses the reader directly, which makes for a much more conversational, intimate journey for the reader. He takes in the delights of France,Greece, Italy, Egypt and Algeria to name but a few. His dialogue about discovering the works of Gaudi in Barcelona is particularly charming and enthusiastic and his juxtaposition of the serious and silly works beautifully.
This is a book of its time, and in this way reminded me very much of the travel books of Lawrence Durrell which I also loved. It is worth reading, not because you will ever be able to retrace his steps, but precisely because you won't, and you are able to enter into a unique series of snapshots of a bygone era. Delightful.

Entertaining
Like all Waugh's prose this book is entertaining and elegant, with effortless one-liners peppering the text. It is not a great book, and not Waugh's best. But if the aim of a travel book is to stimulate interest in the places the author has visited, then this book does succeed in that. Obviously all the people he wrote about are long dead and the world he describes is gone too. Nevertheless, it does stimulate the appetite for travel and gives a different slant as Waugh seemed to be more interested in the people he saw and met than the famous sites.