![]() An Oxford porter says to an undergraduate who has just been expelled: "I expect you'll be becoming a school master, sir. A primitive ruler, eager to be modern, is induced by a wily contractor to purchase boots for his barefoot army: the savages happily heat up their cookpots and devour the boots. "Pure Evelyn Waugh." The expression evokes a riotously anarchic cosmos, in which only the outrageous can happen, and - when it does happen is outrageously diverting in which people reason and behave with awesome inconsequence and lunatic logic. The adjective "Waughsian" is too much of a tongue twister to have passed into our vocabulary, but a substitute phrase has - "It's pure Evelyn Waugh." He is, par excellence, an example of the artist who has created a world peculiarly his own. ![]() ![]() WHEN blurb writers are caroling the praises of some newly emerged maestro of sophisticated farce, they can seldom resist the temptation of comparing him to "the early Evelyn Waugh." Despite the fact that Brideshead Revisited - which introduces the "later" or "serious" Evelyn Waugh - has sold many more copies in the United States than all of Waugh's other books put together, his name, at least among the literary - is still most apt to evoke a singular brand of comic genius. ![]() ![]() Evelyn Waugh: The Best and The Worst - 10.54 ![]()
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