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Takes events up to 1930 when the author was thirty-two.
Alec Waugh, who served in the last war as a regular army officer, was recalled to his regiment in September 1939. After a few months of regimental duties he has filled a succession of Junior Staff appointment, with the B.E.F. in France, in London during the Blitz, with the M.E.F in Syria and Egypt and latterly with the Persia and Iraq command. This book is the narrative of his four years in khaki. It makes no attempt to be sensational, but the range and variety of those experiences have provided ample scope for that capacity to convey character, atmosphere and landscape which has made Alec Waugh so popular a novelist.
First published in 1967, this tells of an Author, publisher, traveller, cricketer, lover of wine: Alec Waugh has been all these in the course of a life which has brought him a host of friends around the world. He is a warm person who knows a good friend when he sees one and is revered by all those with whom there has been mutual acceptance. This book contains his memories of many famous writers and some figures no longer so well remembered in the period between the wars. The section which will, no doubt, command the most attention is that devoted to the youth of his younger brother Evelyn. This throws invaluable light on the early years of a great but difficult man and reveals an insight which only one so close as a brother could have.
Hailing from a renowned literary family, the writer Alec Waugh caused a scandal with the publication of his autobiographical novel/memoir, The Loom of Youth. The book treats the subject of homosexual relationships among British schoolboys with a degree of frankness that was unprecedented at the time, and due to its risque nature and keen insights, it went on to be a runaway bestseller.
In the manner and method of Hot Countries and Most Women, in which personal narrative and opinion are woven together with fiction, Mr. Waugh travels through a period and brilliantly pictures the post-war times and tries to explain what has happened to the war generation. He shows a topsy-turvy world. He tells anecdotes and stories with his unfailing charm. He has been courageous in his deductions and provocative in his suggestions as he turns from physical travel to spiritual interpretation.
First published in 1975, this tells of one of the Bright Young Things in that brilliant and stimulating era between the wars, Alec Waugh remembers 1931 as being a year of firsts. It was the year he attended his first garden party, the year he made his first transatlantic phone call, the year he became a member of the MCC. But it was also a year that marked the end of one epoch and the beginning of another, far less frivolous. Nostalgic for the best of that time, Alec Waugh recalls the writers he knew and met here and in America - Somerset Maugham, A J Cronin, John O'Hara, Thurber and Dorothy Parker. Here is an insight into the literary and publishing world of the thirties through an account of the author's own experiences. We hear of Alec Waugh's life at leisure with stories of his family and brother Evelyn, his affairs (with Ruth in California, with Mary in Villefranche, with Elizabeth in London), the wild parties, the tours round the speakeasies, the Atlantic crossings and the fascinating people he met on them.
If you enjoyed the powerful atmosphere of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby you may just have an inkling of the smoothly professional efficacy of Alec Waugh's The Fatal Gift. First published in 1973, this novel breathes the values and attitudes of the early decades of the 20th century. Raymond Peronne has wealth, is bright, is devastatingly attractive to women: his fatal gift. Second son of a baronet, Perronne goes to Oxford (from which he is rusticated), then to New York (in the'20s and '30s) and is in Egypt during the war (moving in circles then, as in this novel, inhabited by such as Evelyn Waugh, Claud Cockburn and Robin Maugham.). In tense anticipation we watch Peronne, for whom good fortune seems always imminent, fall at every point-until he finds the isle of Dominica and begins a love affair the like of which he has never known.
First published in 1961, this collection of Thirteen stories has been compiled as Alec Waugh looked back over his career as an author, and takes from his writing those which he feels are amongst his most personal creations, bringing them together into a panorama. Told in the first person, My Place in the Bazaar represents Waugh's varied experience and view of life as his enchanting stories take place in a variety of world-wide settings.
First published in 1931, this is not the only one of Alec Waugh's novels in which he has described the agonies of a couple who are desperately in love but cannot marry, for it is a situation that he has himself lived through. But it is in this novel that he has drawn most specifically upon experiences he has only alluded to in other books. His protagonist is Gordon Carruthers, who was also the hero of The Loom of Youth, that then shocking and revelatory novel of public-school life. Now transformed into a globe-trotting writer, Carruthers falls in love with a beautiful American socialite, and eventually, while her husband is away, they begin an affair. For reasons that only gradually become clear, their situation seems to be a cul-de-sac, leading to a denouement that is both surprising and, paradoxically, the only possible one. So Lovers Dream is an autobiographical novel in more ways than one. Into it Waugh put not only his love affair but his home, his literary agent, the details of his own life. This makes it both an enthralling tale and a candid self-revelation, and as always in this writer's work, an affectionate evocation of a time he has lived through.
Nor Many Waters first appeared in 1928. This novel is typical Alec Waugh in its charm and grace, and its shrewd perception of human emotions and profound exploration of human relationships.