The Diaries Of Evelyn Waugh

"Evelyn Waugh kept a diary almost continuously from the age of seven until a year before his death in 1966. Extracts from the diaries caused sensation when they were published by the 'Observer'. They are a unique literary document of 300,000 words which provide the background to the novels which made Waugh famous, and gives a continuously sharp and baleful view of the social history of our times. The Diaries throw new light not only on Waugh's work, but on the character of a puzzling, cantankerous and formidable man." --Publisher description.

The diaries of one of our finest novelists - a unique literary document, reissued in Phoenix paperback.

Travel in Africa,the English aristocracy,the bungling and courage of military life,post-1945 America, all these are favourable sites for the diaries of one of the harshest and funniest English novelists of this century.

In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES AND FINANCIAL TIMES Fifty years after Evelyn Waugh’s death, here is a completely fresh view of one of the most gifted -- and fascinating -- writers of our time, the enigmatic author of Brideshead Revisited. Graham Greene hailed Waugh as ‘the greatest novelist of my generation’, and in recent years his reputation has only grown. Now Philip Eade has delivered an authoritative and hugely entertaining biography that is full of new material, much of it sensational. Eade builds upon the existing Waugh lore with access to a remarkable array of unpublished sources provided by Waugh’s grandson, including passionate love letters to Baby Jungman – the Holy Grail of Waugh research - a revealing memoir by Waugh’s first wife Evelyn Gardner (“Shevelyn”), and an equally significant autobiography by Waugh’s commanding officer in World War II. Eade’s gripping narrative illuminates Waugh’s strained relationship with his sentimental father and blatantly favoured elder brother; his love affairs with male classmates at Oxford and female bright young things thereafter; his disastrous first marriage and subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism; his insane wartime bravery; his drug-induced madness; his singular approach to marriage and fatherhood; his complex relationship with the aristocracy; the astonishing power of his wit; and the love, fear, and loathing that he variously inspired in others. One of Eade’s aims is ‘to re-examine some of the distortions and misconceptions that have come to surround this famously complex and much mythologized character’.‘This might look like code for a plan to whitewash the overly blackwashed Waugh,’ comments veteran Waugh scholar Professor Donat Gallagher; ‘but readers fixated on atrocities will not be disappointed . . . I have been researching and writing about Waugh since 1963 and Eade time and again surprised and delighted me.’ Waugh was famously difficult and Eade brilliantly captures the myriad facets of his character even as he casts new light on the novels that have dazzled generations of readers.

If there is a literary gene, then the Waugh family most certainly has it—and it clearly seems to be passed down from father to son. The first of the literary Waughs was Arthur, who, when he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry at Oxford in 1888, broke with the family tradition of medicine. He went on to become a distinguished publisher and an immensely influential book columnist. He fathered two sons, Alec and Evelyn, both of whom were to become novelists of note (and whom Arthur, somewhat uneasily, would himself publish); both of whom were to rebel in their own ways against his bedrock Victorianism; and one of whom, Evelyn, was to write a series of immortal novels that will be prized as long as elegance and lethal wit are admired. Evelyn begat, among seven others, Auberon Waugh, who would carry on in the family tradition of literary skill and eccentricity, becoming one of England’s most incorrigibly cantankerous and provocative newspaper columnists, loved and loathed in equal measure. And Auberon begat Alexander, yet another writer in the family, to whom it has fallen to tell this extraordinary tale of four generations of scribbling male Waughs. The result of his labors is Fathers and Sons, one of the most unusual works of biographical memoir ever written. In this remarkable history of father-son relationships in his family, Alexander Waugh exposes the fraught dynamics of love and strife that has produced a succession of successful authors. Based on the recollections of his father and on a mine of hitherto unseen documents relating to his grandfather, Evelyn, the book skillfully traces the threads that have linked father to son across a century of war, conflict, turmoil and change. It is at once very, very funny, fearlessly candid and exceptionally moving—a supremely entertaining book that will speak to all fathers and sons, as well as the women who love them.

Evelyn Waugh dips his toes into the world of science fiction. In a future, dystopian Britain, Miles Plastic is in prison for arson. Which isn’t so bad, really – the prisons are actually quite nice. When he is released, he finds himself a nice, wholesome job at a state-run euthanasia clinic trying to control the crushing volume of voluntary applicants. At the clinic he meets Clara, a beautiful, bearded woman, and falls in love. But, as it turns out, love formed at a euthanasia clinic is fraught with its own unique challenges. Penguin Random House Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in e-book form, with the highest quality production values. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved.