Some of the novels of Evelyn Waugh:

* Decline and Fall (1928)
* Vile Bodies (1930)
* Labels (1930)
* Remote people (1930)
* Black Mischief (1932)
* A Handful of Dust (1934)
* Ninety-two days (1934)
* Edmund Campion (1935)
* Waugh in Abyssinia (1936)
* Mr Loveday´s little outing and other sad stories (1936)
* Scoop (1938)
* Robbery under law (1939)
* Work Suspended (1942)
* Put Out More Flags (1942)
* Brideshead Revisited (1945)
* When the going was good (1946)
* Scott King´s Modern Europa (1947)
* Wine and piece in war
* The Loved One (1948)
* Helena (1950)
* Men at Arms (1952)
* Love among the ruins (1953)
* Officers and Gentlemen (1955)
* The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957)
* The life of the right reverend Ronald Knox (1959)
* Unconditional Surrender (1961)
* A tourist in Africa (1960)
* Basil seal rides again (1963)
* A little learning (1964)
* The diaries of Evelyn Waugh (1976)
* A little order (1977)
* The letters of Evelyn Waugh (1980)
* The essays, articles and reviews of Evelyn Wagh (1984)
*Mr Wu and Mrs Stich: the letters of Evelyn Waugh and Lady Diana Cooper (1991)

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Opening Lines:

[Order] Mr Sniggs, the Junior Dean, and Mr Postlethwaite, the Domestic Bursar, sat alone in Mr Sniggs' room overlooking the garden quad at Scone College. From the rooms of Sir Alastair Digby-Vane-Trumpington, two staircases away, came a confused roaring and breaking of glass. They alone of the senior members of Scone were at home that evening, for it was the
night of the annual dinner of the Bollinger Club. The others were all scattered over Boar's Hill and North Oxford at gay, contentious little parties, or at other senior common-rooms, or at the meetings of learned societies, for the annual Bollinger dinner is a difficult time for those in authority.

Where are we?

Scone College, Oxford, the mid-1920s.

In brief...

After destroying every symbol of art, learning and individuality they can find the members of the Bollinger Club pour out into the
quad. Here they encounter Paul Pennyfeather, a bland fellow undergraduate returning from a talk at a university society and
looking forward to spending an hour or so before bedtime with his pipe and The Forsyte Saga. Unfortunately the tie Paul is wearing is almost identical to that of the Bollinger Club and as a result they set upon him and remove his trousers.
Subsequently sent down for indecent exposure, Paul finds work as a teacher at Llanabba Castle, a boys' school in Wales, where his colleagues include the ineffectual Mr Prendergast and Captain Grimes, a red-haired paedarast with a wooden leg. The chain of events which his arrival sets in motion will eventually lead him towards a lavish society wedding, imprisonment for
trafficking in the white slave trade and ultimately his death and miraculous resurrection.
 
 

Opening Lines:

[Order] It was clearly going to be a bad crossing. With Asiatic resignation Father Rothschild SJ put down his suitcase in the corner of the bar and went on deck. (It was a small suitcase of imitation crocodile hide. The initials stamped on it in Gothic
characters were not Father Rothschild's, for he had borrowed it that morning from the valet-de-chambre of his hotel. It
contained some rudimentary underclothes, six important new books in six languages, a false beard and a school atlas and gazetteer heavily annotated.) Standing on the deck Father Rothschild leant his elbow on the rail, rested his chin in his hands and surveyed the procession of passengers coming up the gangway, each face eloquent of polite misgiving.

Where are we?

The French coast, sometime in the 1930s: "the near future," Waugh wrote in his preface, "when existing social tendencies have become more marked."

In brief...

Against an endless cycle of parties and balls, socialite Adam Fenwick-Symes and his fellow Bright Young Things seek  usement and shun boredom. In their faithlessness, their combination of voyeurism and exhibitionism and their obsession with the trivial and ephemeral, his social set accurately reflect the modern world in which they thrive - until the collapse of government
and the declaration of the next world war.
 
 

Opening Lines:

[Order] "We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of the Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University, being in this the twenty-fourth year of our life, summoned by the wisdom of Almighty God and the unanimous voice of our people to the throne of our ancestors, do hereby proclaim..." Seth paused in his dictation and gazed out across the harbour where in the fresh breeze of early morning the last dhow was setting sail for the open sea. "Rats," he said; "stinking curs. They are all running away."

Where are we?

Matodi, capital city of Azania in East Africa.

In brief...

Oxford graduate Seth returns to Azania with progressive ideas he is keen to introduce to his turbulent, broadly resistant African
empire. The political instability is viewed disinterestedly (and uninterestedly) by the inert British legation and with an eye on
self-enrichment by the latest visitor to Azania, the opportunistic and charming man-about-Mayfair Basil Seal.
 
 

Opening Lines:

[Order] "Was anyone hurt?" "No one I am thankful to say," said Mrs Beaver, "except two housemaids who lost their heads and jumped through a glass roof into the paved court. They were in no danger. The fire never reached the bedrooms I am afraid. Still, they are bound to need doing up, everything black with smoke and drenched in water and luckily they had that old-fashioned sort of extinguisher that ruins everything. One really cannot complain. The chief rooms were completely gutted and everything was insured. Sylvia Newport knows the people. I must get on to them this morning before that ghoul Mrs Shutter snaps them up."

In brief...

The 1930s: that 'low, dishonest decade', in the words of W H Auden. Tony Last is a mild-mannered feudal landowner sentimentally tied to his hideous Gothic home. Brenda Last is his bored young wife,restlessly swept into the modern metropolitan culture of telephone calls, small service flats and Economics evening classes. And both live in a world where nobody accepts responsibility and nobody takes the blame, because it's a world beyond an individual's control.
 
 

Opening Lines:

[Order] While still a young man, John Courteney Boot had, as his publisher proclaimed, "achieved an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters." His novels sold 15,000 copies in their first year and were read by the people whose opinions John Boot respected. Between novels he kept his name sweet in intellectual circles with unprofitable but modish works
on history and travel. His signed first editions sometimes changed hands at a shilling or two above their original price. He
had published eight books - beginning with a life of Rimbaud written when he was eighteen, and concluding, at the moment, with Waste of Time, a studiously modest description of some harrowing months among the Patagonian Indians - of which most people who lunched with Lady Metroland could remember the names of three or four. He had many charming friends, of whom
the most valued was the lovely Mrs Algernon Stitch.

Where are we?

London, the 1930s.

In brief...

When the Daily Beast needs a reporter to cover an African conflict, the name of fashionable novelist John Courteney Boot is top of the list. It is therefore inconvenient when William Boot, the newspaper's meek writer of the natural history column
("Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole..."), is mistakenly sent in his place.
 
 

Opening Lines:

[Order] At the time of my father's death I was in Morocco, at a small French hotel outside the fortifications of Fez. I had been there for six weeks, doing little else but write, and my book, Murder at Mountrichard Castle, was within twenty thousand words of its end.In three weeks I should pack it up for the typist; perhaps sooner, for I had nearly passed that
heavy middle period where less conscientious writers introduce their second corpse.

Where are we?

Morocco in the early 1930s. Here, in cost-effective isolation, the narrator
John Plant has taken his home.

In brief...

John Plant returns to London to organise his dead father's estate. As the house where he grew up slowly captures his imagination, he renews contact with his politically committed writer friend Roger and his wife Lucy, and suffers the lurking presence of Atwater, the man who killed his father.
 
 

Opening Lines:

[Order] In the week which preceded the outbreak of the Second World War - days of surmise and apprehension which cannot, without irony, be called the last days of peace - and on the Sunday morning when all doubts were finally
resolved and misconceptions corrected, three rich women thought first and mainly of Basil Seal. They were his sister, his mother and his mistress.

Where are we?

London during 'The Phoney War' of 1939-40.

In brief...

Last seen in Black Mischief, ungentlemanly socialite Basil Seal ("he rejoiced, always, in the spectacle of women at a disadvantage...") still maintains his distance from gainful employment and marriage. Against a background of military preparation and war's permeation into every aspect of life - where aesthete Ambrose Silk's efforts to maintain artistic standards with his magazine Ivory Tower are misinterpreted as the machinations of a Nazi propagandist - Basil seeks fresh opportunities to exploit the well-meaning and respond to the spirit of the times.
 
 

Opening Lines:

[Order] When I reached 'C' Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning. We were leaving that day. When we marched in, three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding. I had reflected then that, whatever
scenes of desolation lay ahead of us, I never feared one more brutal than this, and I reflected now that it had no single happy
memory for me. Here love had died between me and the Army.

Where are we?

Scotland, 1942. The army company captained by Charles Ryder - whose 'Sacred and Profane Memories' we are about to read - is on the edgeof departing for a new camp.

In brief...

The company disembark from the train outside Brideshead, the ancestral seat of the aristocratic Marchmain dynasty, a house and a family that in his past Ryder had once loved deeply. His return sets loose reflections upon his undergraduate love in 1920s Oxford for the younger son Sebastian, his affair with the daughter Julia, his aesthetic development the house
stimulated and the jaundiced but acute judgements of flamboyant Anthony Blanche.
 
 

Opening lines:

[Order] All day the heat had been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the west, blowing from the heat of the setting sun and from the ocean, which lay unseen, unheard behind the scrubby foothills. It shook the rusty fingers of palm-leaf and swelled the dry sounds of summer, the frog-voices, the grating cicadas, and the ever present pulse of music from
the neighbouring native huts. In that kindly light the stained and blistered paint of the bungalow and the plot of weeds between the veranda and the dry water-hole lost their extreme shabbiness, and the two Englishmen, each in his rocking-chair, each with his whisky and soda and his outdated magazine, the counterparts of numberless fellow-countrymen exiled in the barbarous
regions of the world, shared in the brief illusory rehabilitation.

Where are we?

This barbarous region is Los Angeles in the late 1940s.

In brief...

To Whispering Glades Memorial Park comes Dennis Barlow, a sardonic British expatriate working at the neighbouring pet cemetery. The observance of the American Way of Death draws him into an enchanted but strictly hygienic realm of leafy parkland, tree-shrouded lake islands and bombproof mock-Tudor administrative buildings. Aimee Thanatogenos, a beautician who prepares the Loved Ones for their resting places, takes on the task of guiding him through the hidden secrets of Whispering Glades, and the far deeper mysteries of her country.
 
 

Helena, a "biography" of Constantine's mother, is a failure as a historical novel. For one thing, it is tendentiously Christian (Catholic), pushing twentieth century parodies of  Arianism and gnosticism back into the fourth century as straw-men. More tellingly, it  never really conveys any feel for the period and doesn't offer much in the way of  humour to compensate.
 
 

Opening Lines:

[Order] When Guy Crouchback's grandparents, Gervase and Hermione, came to Italy on their honeymoon, Frenchtroops manned the defences of Rome, the Sovereign Pontiff drove out in an open carriage and Cardinals took their exercise side-saddle on the Pincian Hill.
Gervase and Hermione were welcomed in a score of frescoed palaces. Pope Pius received them in private audience and
gave his special blessing to the union of two English families which had suffered for their Faith and yet retained a round share
of material greatness. The chapel at Broome had never lacked a priest through all the penal years and the lands of Broome
stretched undiminished and unencumbered from the Quantocks to the Blackdow Hills. Forbears of both their names had died on the scaffold. The City, lapped now by the tide of illustrious converts, still remembered with honour its old companions in arms.

In brief...

The non-aggression pact between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany spurs Catholic aristocrat Guy Crouchback from his self-imposed Italian exile into enlistment with the British army. Billeted with the porpoise-booted, chemical-toilet-wielding Apthorpe, Guy finds his chivalric notions of battle sharply exposed as redundant in the face of monotony and blunder.
 
 

Opening Lines:

[Order] The sky over London was glorious, ochre and madder, as though a dozen tropic sums were simultaneously setting round the horizon; everywhere the searchlights clustered and hovered, then swept apart; here and there pitchy clouds drifted and billowed; now and then a huge flash momentarily froze the serene fireside glow. Everywhere the shells sparkled like
Christmas baubles. "
Pure Turner," said Guy Crouchback, enthusiastically; he came fresh to these delights.
"John Martin, surely?" said Ian Kilbannock.
"No," said Guy firmly. He would not accept correction on matters of art from this former sporting-journalist. "Not Martin. The sky-line is too low. The scale is less than Babylonian."
They stood at the top of St James's Street. Half-way down Turtle's Club was burning briskly. From Piccadilly to the Palace the whole jumble of incongruous facades was caricatured by the blaze.

Where are we?

London during the Blitz, 1940.

In brief...

After his awkward handling of basic training, an excursion in West Africa and his role in an accidental killing which ended Men at Arms, Guy resigns himself to a wartime career of administrative jobs and string-pulling for commissions. When he is eventually plunged into the real theatre of war during the surrender in Crete, he is forced to confront cowardice, betrayal
and incompetence at the highest level.
 
 

Opening Lines:

[Order] It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century. The originators, the exuberant men, are extinct and in their place
subsists and modestly flourishes a generation notable for elegance and variety of contrivance. It may well happen that there are lean years ahead in which our posterity will look back hungrily to this period, when there was so much will and so much ability to please. Among these novelists Mr Gilbert Pinfold stood quite high.

In brief...

Novelist Gilbert Pinfold is en route to Ceylon via cruise ship.Trapped in a cabin with thin walls, for twenty-four hours a day he
is bombarded by the mocking disembodied voices of his fellow passengers. Only gradually does he realise that his persecutors are really phantoms of his imagination and that he is in the throes of a drug-induced mental breakdown.
 
 

Opening Lines:

[Order] When Guy Crouchback returned to his regiment in the autumn of 1941 his position was in many ways anomalous. He had been trained in the first batch of temporary officers, had commanded a company, had been detached for special duties, had been in action and acquitted himself with credit; he had twice put up captain's stars and twice removed them; their scars were
plainly visible on his shoulder straps. He had been invalided home on an order from GHQ ME and the medical authorities
could find nothing wrong with him. There were rumours that he had 'blotted his copybook' in West Africa. When he was commissioned in 1939 his comparative old age had earned him the soubriquet 'uncle'. Now he was two years older and the second batch of officers in training were younger than those who had joined with him. To them he seemed a patriarch; to him they seemed a generation divided by an impassable barrier.

In brief...

The second of the totalitarian powers has now aligned with Guy's cause and his chivalric ideals are fatally compromised. With the Soviet Union's entry on the Allied side seeming to assure an eventual victorious outcome, at what cost will this be established and what changed world will emerge?
 

From:
 www.Kirjasto.sci.fi/ewaugh.htm
 

 www.booksellersnow.com/bsnauthorevelynwaugh.htm
 

 www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/70688/sub21/107-9067083-7520508
 

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