Evelyn Waugh was an English novelist, born in London in 1903, widely regarded as one of the supreme prose stylists and satirists of the twentieth century.
Educated at Oxford, which he left without a degree, and received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1930 - a faith that would come to shape his fiction - he served through the Second World War, including as a commando, before and after cementing his reputation with a run of glittering, mordant comedies of English life.
He made his name with the savage social satires Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, skewering the 'Bright Young People' of the 1920s, and sharpened it further in A Handful of Dust and the newspaper farce Scoop. His most famous and most heartfelt novel is Brideshead Revisited, an elegiac, explicitly Catholic story of a grand aristocratic family in decline, later a celebrated television series. He drew on his own war for the Sword of Honour trilogy, and lampooned the American way of death in The Loved One.
Famously acid-tongued - a contemporary called him 'the nastiest-tempered man in England' - yet a writer of dazzling wit and precision, he remains among the most quoted and admired of modern English novelists.
