Volume 27, Number 19 · December 4, 1980
Waugh's Last Stand
By Clive James
The Letters of Evelyn Waugh
edited by Mark Amory
Ticknor and Fields, 664 pp., $25.00
Unless the telephone is uninvented, this will probably be the last collection of letters by a great writer to be also a great collection of letters. It could be argued that the book should have been either much shorter, so as to be easily assimilable, or else much larger, so as to take in all of the vast number of letters Waugh wrote, but even at this awkward length it is a wonderfully entertaining volume—even more so, in fact, than the Diaries. Here is yet one more reason to thank Evelyn Waugh for his hatred of the modern world. If he had not loathed the telephone, he might have talked all this away.
Review, 2801 words
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