Book description
In
Robbery Under Law
, subtitled 'The Mexican Object Lesson', Waugh presents a profoundly
unpeaceful Mexican situation as a cautionary tale in which a once great
civilisation - greater than the United States at the turn of the
twentieth century - has succumbed, within the space of a single
generation, to barbarism. Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903,
second son of Arthur Waugh, publisher and literary critic, and brother
of Alec Waugh, the popular novelist. He was educated at Lancing and
Hertford College, Oxford, where he read Modern History. In 1928 he
published his first work, a life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and his
first novel, Decline and Fall
, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies
(1930), Black Mischief
(1932), A Handful of Dust
(1934) and Scoop
(1938). Waugh travelled extensively and also wrote several travel
books, as well as a biography of Edmund Campion and Ronald Knox. Other
famous works include his Sword of Honour
trilogy, and Brideshead Revisited
(1945).
