Book description
Between 1929 and 1935 Evelyn Waugh travelled widely and wrote four
books about his experiences. In this collection he writes, with his
customary wit and perception, about a cruise around the Mediterranean; a
train trip from Djibouti to Abyssinia to attend Emperor Haile Selassie's
coronation in 1930; his travels in Aden, Zanzibar, Kenya and the Congo,
coping with unbearable heat and plagued by mosquitoes; a journey to
Guyana and Brazil; and his return to Addis Ababa in 1935 to report on
the war between Abyssinia and Italy. Waugh's adventures on his travels
gave him the ideas for such classic novels as
Scoop
and Black Mischief
. 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).
