I wrote this for Penguin Books about Evelyn Waugh, why he is one of the funniest English writers of the last century, and which of his books you should (and shouldn’t) read.
Evelyn Waugh
Asylum
John Self's Shelves
I wrote this for Penguin Books about Evelyn Waugh, why he is one of the funniest English writers of the last century, and which of his books you should (and shouldn’t) read.
Asylum 
I would argue there is no Waugh you shouldn’t read, even “Brideshead Revisited” is not without its virtues, although it is quite different in tone and feeling to his many better novels. You are quite right that “Sword of Honour” is probably his masterpiece. I am not ashamed to say that I guffawed aloud in a wine bar on Lower Marsh in 2007 on reading the section detailing the death of Brigadier Ritchie-Hook. (There is, of course, the great debate about whether “Sword of Honour” is better or not that the individual novels.)
Loved reading the article! 😍
Ever since I read Americanah by Adichie, Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Greene’s The End of the Affair are in my TBR List. 😁
Those who restrict themselves to new fiction are missing out on some very funny Evelyn Waugh novels like Scoop and Vile Bodies. And the short novel ‘The Loved Ones’ is a riot.
I like “The Complete Stories” of Evelyn Waugh the best, more than his acclaimed books about wars, journalists, and the far away colony etc. He is the funniest of all writers and the most stylish, but his conservative view just spoils the ending of many of his stories. Stories like “Winners Take All”, “Too Much Tolerance”, “On Guard”, “The Man Who Liked Dickens” infuriated me when the schemers and bullies always win while ordinary people are too inept to fight back. The other thing that infuriates me is that whenever there’s not much interest between the man and the woman, they end up in a relationship “Love In The Slump” and several others. When there is a desire, like Dennis in “The Loved One”, he just can’t succeed. I often wonder if there’s a book that can combine Evelyn Waugh’s style with George Orwell’s ideas. No such book in existence, but how good if it is.
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