Evelyn Waugh Evelyn Waugh first wrote for the Spectator some
thirty years ago; his last piece (an apprecia- tion of Alfred Duggan) appeared in July 1964. During the greater part of the intervening years this paper was, I'm glad to record, his most favoured platform on the rare occasions on which he felt it proper to contribute to the press. Inevitably, the relationship was not always an easy one. He flatly refused to discuss anything over the telephone (the postcard was his preferred method of communication) and for some time insisted on his holograph manuscripts being re- turned to him after publication, evidently sus- pecting that if they weren't the Spectator would sell them for large sums of money. But his pieces themselves combined the qualities of his more substantial writing with a brevity and economy which should be an object-lesson to every journa- list. Anthony Burgess and Alan Brien write on Waugh the writer and Waugh the man on the next page. Life will be duller without him. And who will now proclaim the unfashionable values of privacy and order, in both senses of that word?
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