Evelyn Waugh: the Early Years: The Early Years (Paladin Books) - Softcover

'Will surely become the standard Waugh biography'
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

'Stannard has drawn judiciously on the prodigious amount of source material now available and provided a detailed, lucid and fascinating account of the novelist's first thirty-six years. Waugh emerges from these pages as a darkly complex and by no means wholly unsympathetic man. Melancholy and isolated, with a surprising capacity for warmth and a mordantly satirical disposition, he cultivated eccentricity as a means of protecting his liberty and privacy.
'Stannard analyses the man's work in the context of the developing personality, offering invaluable insights into Waugh as novelist, journalist, biographer and travel writer. Reading his acute critical study works up a keen appetite for reading Waugh himself.'
LISTENER

'A literary biography of the same calibre as Richard Ellman's 'James Joyce''
WASHINGTON POST

'Not only prodigiously well-researched but extremely perceptive in its assessment of the writing and shrewdly balanced in its judgement of the bizarre and often impossible man'
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

'Provides the full facts behind Waugh's private fantasies and public fiction'
ALAN BOLD, 'Scotsman'

'Diligent about tracing sources, finely perceptive in relation to intellectual and literary development, as near the impartial as it is possible to be about Evelyn Waugh'
JULIAN SYMONS, 'Guardian'

'In this shrewd, meticulous work of research, Waugh's life has all the piquant entertainment of Waugh fiction'
OBSERVER