After a traditional classical education at Downside School, he was commissioned in the army during National Service, where he was badly injured in a shooting accident.

Laura's half-uncle was George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, the famous Egyptologist who sponsored Howard Carter who discovered King Tutankhamen's tomb, and her mother was Hon.

[3] His parents being Roman Catholics (his mother by birth and his father by conversion), he was educated at the Benedictine Downside School in Somerset[4] and passed his Greek and Latin A-level exams at the early age of fifteen.

[3] As a result of his injuries, he lost his spleen, one lung, several ribs, and a finger, and suffered from pain and recurring infections for the rest of his life.

Waugh strongly criticised Harold Wilson's government, especially the foreign secretary Michael Stewart, for colluding in the use of mass starvation as a political weapon.

In 1990 he returned to The Daily Telegraph as the successor of Michael Wharton (better known as "Peter Simple"), writing the paper's long-running Way of the World column three times a week until December 2000.

In 1995 he finally ended his long association with The Spectator, but in 1996 he rejoined The Sunday Telegraph, where he remained a weekly columnist until shortly before his death.

In his autobiography Will This Do?, Waugh claimed that he had broken two bottles of wine by banging them together too hard to celebrate when she lost her House of Commons seat at Hertford and Stevenage in the general election of 1979.

[8] He has been called a nostalgist and a romantic, with a strong tendency towards snobbery, although his anarchistic streak ensured that he retained the admiration of a number of people whom he would have considered "progressive" or "leftish", including Francis Wheen, who vociferously disagreed with Toynbee's obituary comments.

"[10] In a letter dated 15 January 1973, writer Guy Davenport reported, "Auberon Waugh in the English press giggled over Ez's demise [1 November 1972], informing his audience that Pound's silly verse was so much twaddle, and his example the cause of Modern Poetry and all its vulgar pretense.

There was a certain amount of public posturing in his popular anti-Americanism; he visited the US whenever he could, and spent notable time holidaying in New England and on US speaking tours.

In 1995 he was against attempts by the then Home Secretary Michael Howard to introduce a national identity card, a policy which at the time was opposed by the Labour Party.

Along with Patrick Marnham and Richard West, Waugh was one of three signatories to a letter to The Times that called for a British monument to honour those repatriated as a result of the Yalta Conference; it was eventually erected in 1986.

[5] They had four children: They lived at the Old Rectory, Chilton Foliat, Wiltshire, from 1964 to 1971, then moved into Waugh's father's old home, Combe Florey House in Somerset.

For example, in a leader piece for the Literary Review in 1991 he commented upon sceptic James Randi's dismissal on British television of the supposed art of dowsing for water.

Waugh's health declined considerably throughout the final months of his life, and died from heart failure at Combe Florey House on 16 January 2001, at the age of 61.