Cover of Will This Do? An Autobiography

Will This Do? An Autobiography

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.

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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.

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 288 pages

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