Customer Reviews (1)

A different Waugh
In this book we find a different Waugh, without his acustomed piercing humour. Two biographies, one of a saint and martyr an the other of a converted priest and scholar. It's very practical finding both works together in a single volume. Campion'life is a masterpiece of hagiography. In this kind of work it's common the lacking of literary excellence. Here we have a deep investigation offered to us in the best style. The life of Ronnie Knox -in spite of some observations we can find in Christopher Syke's biography of Waugh, very interesting in fact- we can living with him, and we cannot not loving him. We are obliged to think a lot about our own spiritual life and about the problems of catholic culture in last cantury. ... Read more

Book Description

Term paper due tomorrow? Need to cram for a test? Or just looking for the best information about a favorite literary work?

Turn to "Novels for Students" to get your research done in record time. Brought to you by Thomson Gale--the world's leading source of literary criticism and analysis--this e-doc contains: plot summary; character analysis; author biography; an overview of the novel's themes, style, and historical context; a compendium of in-depth critical material; study questions; suggestions for further reading; and much more.

Why choose "Novels For Students"? Because no other source offers so much in such a compact package. Trust the experts: Thomson Gale--and "Novels for Students."Download Description

Term paper due tomorrow? Need to bone up for a test? Or just looking for the best information about a favorite literary work?

Turn to "Novels for Students" to get your research done in record time. Brought to you by the Gale Group--the world's leading source of literary criticism and analysis--this e-doc contains: plot summary; character analysis; author biography; an overview of the novel's themes, style, and historical context; a compendium of in-depth critical material; study questions; suggestions for further reading; and much more.

Why choose "Novels For Students"? Because no other source offers so much in such a compact package. Trust the experts: The Gale Group--and "Novels for Students." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

unnecessary
Mostly just a plot summary and list of characters.A few essays describe topics that should be largely self evident to an adult reader.I was hoping for more explanations (footnotes) on Waugh's many culural, social and historical references to supplement my reading of the book. ... Read more

Book Description
Scale 1:11,000. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Good but old format better
Good map, but when Borch bought Berndtson & Berndtson they changed the colors, information, and format style of the maps, and although the maps are still acceptable, I personally liked the old formats better, as the maps seemed an easier read. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Evelyn Waugh "was not very good at invention," asserts David Wykes, "but he was unsurpassed at embroidery." For readers interested in learning how Waugh's life shaped his writing, Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life is a handy short reference. Wykes's focus on the relationship between biographical events and literary output means that Evelyn Waugh is not, strictly speaking, a biography (and Wykes is the first to recommend the preexisting biographies, especially the two-volume life by Martin Stannard); rather, it is a work of literary criticism--and, for that matter, one in which Wykes has quite firm opinions about which of Waugh's books stand the test of time. Still, there is the occasional fun biographical fact to be gleaned, such as the story of how, determined to revenge himself upon Americans, who loved Brideshead Revisited for what he considered all the wrong reasons, Waugh finagled a free trip to Los Angeles out of a film studio. Visiting Forest Lawn Cemetery, he developed the idea for a brutally scathing satire, The Loved One ... in love with which American readers promptly fell. (Note: some of the stories that Wykes described as having never been republished are, in fact, included in the 1999 anthology The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh.)Book Description
Waugh's life and his literary life exist in fascinating, dynamic relationship. Virtually all of his fiction was autobiographical, yet he maintained that his novels were "objects," unrelated to the life of their author. This study traces the shifting relationship of ascertainable fact and imaginative fiction throughout Waugh's career, focusing on the endless negotiation he conducted between life and art, and on why, from being author of the anarchic, hilarious Decline and Hell, he transformed himself into the author of the romantic, eschatological Brideshead Revisited. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Rereading this after 14 years - what a wonderful book!
I loved it the first time but may be enjoying it even more the second--possibly because in the interim I have read Beerbohm (Zuleika Dobson in particular; the existence of which this book made me aware), Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, and others. (In some ways this group literary biography tops Powell's work - by the end of Time, I felt a bit worn out by the multitude of characters who appeared so briefly, whereas here I feel like I get a bead on even the most minor "characters." Very much feel like I'm in the company of someone who knows his stuff--knows the best stories--has an eye for great detail and great anecdote, and an empathy (balanced by humor, or vice versa) for his subjects. And he's sitting there in a study with a ton of personal letters and memoirs and diaries spread out on the table, pointing out the best bits. Excellent writer, too. And no, I am no relation....

Serious and Amusing
This is an admirable book, well written, balanced and well researched. After a slightly hesitant start, the scene shifts to Oxford in the early twenties; it comes across as a very dissolute place, with distinct homosexual undertones. The noticeable "public school" backdrop leaves you wondering why anyone should send their child to an English boarding school (at very great expense, incidentally). But they did, and still do. However, at Oxford we are introduced to a veritable galaxy of talent, including Evelyn Waugh, the lead character in the book, Graham Greene, John Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, Anthony Powell and others. There are some very amusing quotes and anecdotes.

But the book becomes increasingly serious, and whilst not specifically a work of literary criticism, it cites reviews and gives the background to the works of Waugh and to a lesser extent others. It also looks at the curious world of the Roman Catholic convert. At the end I felt a little sad for Waugh and some of his contemporaries. In spite of their achievements, by no means all of them seemed happy. ... Read more

Book Description
Popular English comic novelist. Key themes: Catholicism and decline of the aristocracy. Writings include: Sword of Honour, Brideshead Revisited, Black Mischief. Volume covers the period 1926-1980.

Book Description
This digital document is an article from First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, published by Institute on Religion and Public Life on May 1, 2004. The length of the article is 2052 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: When the Going Was Bad.(Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing)(Book Review)
Author: David B. Hart
Publication: First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life (Refereed)
Date: May 1, 2004
Publisher: Institute on Religion and Public Life
Issue: 143Page: 50(4)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Waugh's "A Little Learning"
Literary autobiographies can be a problematic genre. I for one find Nabokov's evasiveness in "Speak, Memory" to be aggravatingly coy. Though an avid reader of Waugh's fiction, I was concerned that "A Little Learning" might prove similarly opaque in tone. I was pleased to see that it is a remarkably straightforward text. Though it will not provide any revelations to readers of any biography of the author, "A Little Learning" impressed me with its apparent honesty, frequent self-deprecation, and, perhaps most surprising, its occasional warmth. The last is not an emotion one typically associates with Waugh.

The opening line establishes the bemused tone of the book: "Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography." It is of course unfortunate that Waugh died at the absurdly young age of 63 before producing any further books in what was intended to be a multi-volume autobiography.

As it is, "A Little Learning" takes us through Waugh's early youth and education, concluding during his ignominious experience as a teacher in an obscure boarding school. There, despite his displeasure with the job and seeming bleak prospects in life, Waugh showed the early stirrings of the literary efforts which would eventually make his name.

The concluding episode is the well-known incident in which Waugh attempted to commit suicide (or so he says) by swimming out to sea, only to change his mind after being stung by a jellyfish. This incident was, by the way, also used as a plot element in Anthony Powell's "Afternoon Men." ... Read more

Amazon.com
"All over England people were waking up, queasy anddespondent."

Few writers have walked the line between farce and tragedy as nimbly as Evelyn Waugh, who employed the conventions of the comic novel to chip away at the already crumbling English class system. His 1934 novel, A Handful of Dust, is a sublime example of his bleak satirical style: a mordantly funny exposé of aristocratic decadence and ennui in England between the wars.

Tony Last is an aristocrat whose attachment to an ideal feudal past is so profound that he is blind to his wife Brenda's boredom with the stately rhythms of country life. While he earnestly plays the lord of the manor in his ghastly Victorian Gothic pile, she sets herself up in a London flat and pursues an affair with the social-climbing idler John Beaver. In the first half of the novel Waugh fearlessly anatomizes the lifestyles of the rich and shameless. Everyone moves through an endless cycle of parties and country-house weekends, being scrupulously polite in public and utterly horrid in private.Sex is something one does to relieve the boredom, and Brenda's affair provides a welcome subject for conversation:

It had been an autumn of very sparse and meagre romance; only the most obvious people had parted or come together, and Brenda was filling a want long felt by those whose simple, vicarious pleasure it was to discuss the subject in bed over the telephone.

"Waugh's technique is relentless and razor-edged...by any standard it is super satire." (Chicago Daily News) ... Read more

Customer Reviews (61)

The Descension of Decadence
The author paints a poignant tale of immorality, Carnality, and Sordidness. The book teaches one of the hollow and shameful lives most of the wealthy live.Caught up in selfishness and materiality; they breath only to sate themselves.The top antagonist, Brenda Lost is one of the most loathsome characters I have ever read about.This story was published in the 1930's.However, it is as elucidating about today's world as it was then.

Scorpius rising
A detailed analysis of Waugh's `A Handful of Dust' falls outside the scope of the thumbnail sketches usually provided on Amazon and I won't attempt it here (in other words, I'm too lazy to try.)I would like to make a couple of observations...I gave the book five stars and don't know why anybody wouldn't.It's not King Lear but what is?The book is supposed to be a satire on the English class system but it seems to be completely in love with it.Still, there is real venom in Waugh's depiction and it's hard to tell if he really wanted to do away with a system of privilege that had been around for so long, or if he only wanted to hold it up for ridicule and then return it to its rightful place with the boot print of the People still on its backside.One thing I'm almost sure of- if Waugh were writing today I think he would be horrified by self-indulgent middle class that succeeded the equally self-indulgent old aristocracy and would be even more bitterly disposed to it than the lords and ladies in Handful.So much so that his head might actually explode, which would be entertaining but messy.

This is the question I have- was it worth it?Did we build the workers' paradise on the grounds of the old estates?Personally, I think people's daily lives are much better than they ever could be under the older systems, but life has become dismal, tiresome and ugly- we got none of the noblesse and all of the oblige.Glass skyscrapers, tiny uncomfortable cars, happy hour replaced by specialty coffee chains, hunting parties replaced by speed dating, and maybe worst of all- that bumpy stuff that covers the ceiling of every house built in the last 30 years.To top it all off, that clown who covers bridges in colored cling wrap and calls it art.He gets his own special place in hell.

We should have adopted the attitude when we took the mantle of power.As it is, we now have a nation of rich people who don't know how to tell the gardener stop putting so much lime on the rose beds.

Brilliant comedy, but almost too dark to be really entertaining
A dark, biting, social satire of 20th Century Britain.Tony and Brenda Last (as in Last of the Old Gentry) would seem to have it all - wealth, position, and domestic bliss.But trouble enters their idyll in the unassuming form of the parasitic Mr. Beaver, who visits their ancestral home of Hetton and winds up shattering their illusions of contentment.Admirably paced and crushing in its honesty, Waugh shows us how easily this house of cards (and by extension the old social order) crumbles.

As usual, Waugh's humor doesn't produce belly-laughs, but rather wry, knowing smiles of recognition.Beaver's worthlessness, Brenda's duplicity, Tony's friends' complicit silence, the local gossip's fascination, Tony's obliviousness, the endless parties and lunches and drinking - all are targets for Waugh's unblinking satiric gaze.And then tragedy strikes.

After the dust settles, the story takes us into a remote jungle where Tony (who feels he has lost everything) tries to restore his self-worth by seeking the fabled city of El Dorado - the City of Gold.While this may seem like an unnecessary digression for such a realistic novel, it works admirably well on a symbolic level.Tony's horrifying fate at the conclusion of the book stands as a chilling metaphor for the ultimately loveless marriage that the protagonists had fallen into.Apparently, Waugh felt that marriage was just one more fragile institution that had failed humankind.

Brilliant though this novel is, it's difficult to say who it should be recommended to.Students of literature will surely admire Waugh's exquisite style, and social critics may find it a fascinating novel of manners for the period, but overall the story is so dark that one wonders how many people will really enjoy it.Recommended for perrenial bachelors and sour divorcees, and readers whose faith in their own relationships is so unshakable that they can tell themselves that this book is about other peoples' marriages and not theirs.

Society Novel About Adultery
Evelyn Waugh's "A Handful of Dust," first published in 1934, was, of course, quite popular in its time, with both critics and readers.As a society novel about adultery, it was considered to be quite satiric and witty, and an accurate portrait of the vicious upper-crust London society between the twentieth century's two great wars (And so it seems to be.)The book has been described as the story of the 19th century fictional French character, Mme. Bovary, literature's most famous female adulterer, as rewritten by Noel Coward, one of twentieth century England's greatest society wits.However, these days, most people know Waugh, one of the outstanding twentieth century English novelists, only for his more mellow post-World War II "Brideshead Revisited," as filmed and frequently shown on public television -- if they know the author at all.

The title "A Handful of Dust," to begin with, is a quote from the lengthy poem "The Wasteland," by T.S. Eliot, famous Anglo-American poet of the early twentieth century."Dust," the book, really only novella length at about 210 pages, concerns Lady Brenda and Tony Last, young couple.Tony is considered to be too involved with Hettam, his family home, then considered a hideous Victorian pile, and with trying to lead a proper Victorian lord of the manor life, to pay proper attention to the selfish Brenda and to realize she's bored silly.So she starts an affair with John Beaver, bounder, and soon enough seeks a divorce.

All sources agree that this book was Waugh's revenge on his first wife, who was then seeking a divorce.Allsources, including the author, writing himself, in this book, further agree that, having got that far, he was at a loss for how to end it.So he incorporated a previously-published short story of some note, folding Tony into that action, and having this character, somewhat puzzlingly, going off to explore Brazil.The effect of this is that, for the relatively minor sin of inattention, the more sinned-against than sinning Tony meets what most of us would agree is an extremely sad end; whereas the author has Lady Brenda marrying Tony's wealthier, member of parliament (and thus generally resident in London) friend Jock Grant-Menzies, MP, thus appearing, at least, to have come out ahead.This was what Waugh intended: he wrote,"Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long."The author definitely did not believe in offering his audience any easy consolation.

Interestingly enough, the author had still to provide another ending for the American edition of this book: an American magazine had published, and owned the copyright on, the story he used to end the British edition.The alternative ending he came up with, also printed here, is much shorter than the other.It has Tony coming back unharmed from the foreign travel then expected of a divorcing man, to be met at the dock by Brenda, already regretting her adventure with Beaver.And Tony has begun to think of spicing up his life, much as Brenda had previously done.Either way, it's obvious that nobody really comes out ahead here.

Wodehouse meets Greene
This novel begins in fine comic form in a world that might come straight out of P. G. Wodehouse; it ends (more or less) in the jungles of British Guiana, in the world of Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene.The journey between one and the other is always interesting and often amusing, but it lacks internal logic. This is a book that its author began with total mastery, but did not quite know how to end.

The Wodehouse world is one of 1930s high society: luncheon and cocktail parties in town, weekend house-parties in the country. The "Bertie Wooster" character here, known as Beaver and deliberately vapid, basically waits around for invitations to make up the numbers at one of these gatherings. His club, Brats, might as well be Wodehouse's Drones. Due to an error, Beaver turns up alone one weekend at the ancestral home of Tony Last (a squire very much devoted to his house and village) and his wife Lady Brenda. Before long, Brenda and Beaver are in an affair, and the book truly begins.

The result, as William Boyd describes it in his excellent introduction to the Everyman edition (though NOT to be read before the book itself), is "MADAME BOVARY rewritten by Noel Coward." The comic tone persists almost all through the novel, and it includes many scenes that are hilariously funny (for example, the Vicar who recycles sermons first preached thirty years before in India without adjusting any of their topical details). But Waugh is less loving as a comedian, more satirical, more ruthless with his characters. About halfway through the book, something occurs that absolutely does not belong in a comedy. The jolt is shocking, but the truly horrible thing is that it hardly shakes the comic mechanisms at all. Despite occasional glimpses of true feeling, one thing continues to lead to another on the plot level, dictated more by circumstance than by character. There are still many funny moments, but one is conscious now of the author manipulating his people, less to let them grow than to pay them back.

And so to that ending in the Amazon jungle. The Everyman Library edition has the advantage of including the alternative ending that Waugh wrote for American serialization, since the short story that he remodeled as the final section of the British book had already appeared in America under a different publisher. This alternative is much shorter, and it is not entirely clear where it would have been grafted on, but in its acerbic brevity it is much more true to the prevailing tone of the book than the longer version. Brilliant though Waugh's Amazon conclusion is, it also seems arbitrary and willful. But in retrospect, so is the entire book, so is the nature of Waugh's comic genius. He may be a Wodehouse or a Coward -- superior to them even -- but he is no Greene and certainly no Flaubert. ... Read more