Will This Do?: The First Fifty Years of Auberon Waugh : an Autobiography - Hardcover

Waugh, Auberon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786705191 ISBN 13: 9780786705191

Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc, 1998

Synopsis

Evelyn Waugh uncharitably once characterized his seven-year-old eldest son as "without intellectual, aesthetic, or spiritual interest", none of which holds true about this long-awaited and well-received autobiography.A self-confessed "product of the bourgeois cultural elite" and guerrilla campaigner against both sides in Britain's class war, Waugh is now comfortably established as his country's best-loved practitioner of what he calls "the vituperative arts". How he achieved this prominence is an unceasingly entertaining narrative: his difficult relationship with his father; his education first at a public school with the Dickensian name of Downside and then at post-Brideshead Oxford; his National Service in the army, during which he severely wounded himself with a machine gun; and his early career as a novelist and then as a Fleet Street journalist and columnist for the notorious, libelous Private Eye. Waugh's matchless intellect, trenchant irony, and dry wit make Will This Do? as enjoyable and outrageous an autobiography as the best of his father's fiction.

About this title

Review:

'Both an exuberant chronicle of English literary life and a very funny sendup.' -- James Atlas, The New Yorker

'Terrifically entertaining...funny, acerbic, and a little sad.' -- Michiko Kahutani, The New York Times

Synopsis:

An autobiography of the journalist son of writer Evelyn Waugh talks about his difficult relationship with his father, his time in the British army, and his journalism career with the libelous Private eye magazine.

About this edition

• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0786705191
• ISBN 13: 9780786705191
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288