No Abiding City: Vol. 2 (Evelyn Waugh: No Abiding City, 1939-66) - Softcover

'No Abiding City : Evelyn Waugh' is the eagerly awaited second and final volume of Martin Stannard’s definitive portrait of one of this century’s greatest British novelists, during the period of some of his finest work: 'Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One' and the 'Sword of Honour' trilogy. Drawing on hundreds of unpublished sources, Stannard reveals for the first time the private man beneath Waugh’s masks of burlesque: a man tormented by his own sense of sinfulness, but whose power to hurt generated laughter and the energy to write, and whose quest for compassion and contrition only resulted in the fading of his imagination.

“By any biographical yardstick, a proud achievement”
NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE, 'Sunday Telegraph'

“Commanding brilliance ... 'Evelyn Waugh' has an enthralling narrative urgency: Stannard skilfully pits scene against scene, cutting and shuffling his raw material with the speed and ironic eye of a good novelist ... A significantly better book than Richard Ellman’s 'Oscar Wilde' – subtler and shrewder in its exploration of an equally masked and complete human being, more fluent and economical in its storytelling, more sophisticated in its critical analysis of the work. It’s that good.”
JONATHAN RABAN, 'Independent on Sunday'

“Deeply researched, sympathetically critical and uncommonly well-written”
FRANK KERMODE

“Obsessively intriguing”
JOHN BAYLEY, 'T.L.S.'

“Marvellously racy and unflinching”
VALENTINE CUNNINGHAM, 'New Statesman & Society'

“Intricately researched and rich in unpublished material ... Immensely enjoyable”
JOHN CAREY, 'Sunday Times'