Evelyn Waugh

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Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, known as Evelyn Waugh, was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and reviewer. His best-known works include the early satires Decline and Fall and A Handful of Dust, the novel Brideshead Revisited, and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour. As a writer, Evelyn Waugh is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century.

The son of a publisher, Waugh was educated at Lancing College and then at Hertford College, Oxford, and briefly worked as a schoolmaster before becoming a full-time writer. As a young man, he acquired many fashionable and aristocratic friends, and developed a taste for country house society that never left him. In the 1930s, he travelled extensively, often as a special newspaper correspondent; thus was he reporting from Abyssinia at the time of the 1935 Italian invasion. He served in the British armed forces throughout the Second World War, first in the Royal Marines and then in the Royal Horse Guards.