Word: waughs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Huxdane-Halley bacterial bomb and infect the enemy with leprosy. Black Mischief was a grim guffaw at the efforts of an Oxford-trained black emperor to apply the notions of liberalism, progress, international uplift and birth control to a country as barbaric as Ethiopia. Scoop, the most rollicking of Waugh's novels, reported the lunacies of Communist and fascist revolts in another African state whose savagery and ignorance were excelled only by the savagery and ignorance of the great British press organization marshaled to cover...
...More Flags, written in six weeks while Waugh was cooped up on a troopship during World War II, described Basil Seal's war effort, in the course of which he profitably blackmailed his sister's respectable neighbors by billeting on them three evacuee children so monstrous as to be almost lifelike...
...Bathtub. The world has never been notably sane, but it exists under the convention that it is-just as in certain families there is an agreement not to notice that a "peculiar" aunt wears three hats to the breakfast table and a sealskin coat in the bathtub. Waugh's world simply ignores that convention. Lunacy is its norm, evil is without guilt, pain without pathos, and tragedy is comedy. Yet, in lucid intervals, the real world and Waugh's world are seen in part to be one. The degree to which they are so measures Evelyn Waugh...
Readers have complained that A Handful of Dust is not as gay as Waugh's earlier novels. It is, in fact, the terrifying crater of the abyss in which Waugh exists. Waugh is a conservative. In his case, this implies an intense sensitivity to the beauty of past forms, an organic response to the moral order that produced them. Waugh is a lover of tradition and hierarchy. In a world which denies hierarchy in the name of equality and tradition in the name of progress, Waugh is a lonely and an angry man. The modern world revolts...
Peristaltic Revulsion. In one degree or another, much of his work is an expression of loathing-a peristaltic revulsion of the soul. Waugh grasps at all outward forms-rank, ceremonies, cuisine, evocations of the architecture of once lovely and stately houses-to arrest the effortless slide of the old world into the muck of modernity. Brideshead is such an evocation...