His most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), the novel Brideshead Revisited (1945), and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour (1952–1961).

[9] At the time of his birth the family were living in North London, at Hillfield Road, West Hampstead where, on 28 October 1903, the couple's second son was born, "in great haste before Dr Andrews could arrive", Catherine recorded.

[19] On the basis of the xenophobia fostered by the genre books of invasion literature, that the Germans were about to invade Britain, Waugh organised his friends into the "Pistol Troop", who built a fort, went on manoeuvres and paraded in makeshift uniforms.

[30] In his later years at Lancing, Waugh achieved success as a house captain, editor of the school magazine and president of the debating society, and won numerous art and literature prizes.

[34] During his first two terms, he generally followed convention; he smoked a pipe, bought a bicycle, and gave his maiden speech at the Oxford Union, opposing the motion that "This House would welcome Prohibition".

[38] Although Waugh tended to regard his scholarship as a reward for past efforts rather than a stepping-stone to future academic success, he did sufficient work in his first two terms to pass his "History Previous", an essential preliminary examination.

[42] He began drinking heavily, and embarked on the first of several homosexual relationships, the most lasting of which were with Hugh Lygon, Richard Pares and Alastair Graham (potentially the inspiration for the fictional character Lord Sebastian Flyte in the novel Brideshead Revisited, though this is rather disputed and was most likely a blend of numerous individuals including Stephen Tennant).

[51] In the summer of 1925, Waugh's outlook briefly improved, with the prospect of a job in Pisa, Italy, as secretary to the Scottish writer C. K. Scott Moncrieff, who was engaged on the English translations of Marcel Proust's works.

[81] A subsequent journey through the British East Africa colonies and the Belgian Congo formed the basis of two books; the travelogue Remote People (1931) and the comic novel Black Mischief (1932).

The death of his father, on 26 June 1943, and the need to deal with family affairs prevented him from departing with his brigade for North Africa as part of Operation Husky (9 July – 17 August 1943), the Allied invasion of Sicily.

The result was Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945),[125] the first of his explicitly Catholic novels of which the biographer Douglas Lane Patey commented that it was "the book that seemed to confirm his new sense of his writerly vocation".

After spells in Dubrovnik and Rome, Waugh returned to London on 15 March 1945 to present his report, which the Foreign Office suppressed to maintain good relations with Tito, now the leader of communist Yugoslavia.

[131] Happy though he was with this outcome, Waugh's principal concern as the war ended was the fate of the large populations of Eastern European Catholics, betrayed (as he saw it) into the hands of Stalin's Soviet Union by the Allies.

[26] In 1951 he visited the Holy Land with his future biographer, Christopher Sykes,[137] and in 1953, he travelled to Goa to witness the final exhibition before burial of the remains of the 16th-century Jesuit missionary-priest Francis Xavier.

[147] Shortage of cash led him to agree in November 1953 to be interviewed on BBC radio, where the panel took an aggressive line: "they tried to make a fool of me, and I don't think they entirely succeeded", Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford.

The interview was broadcast on 26 June 1960; according to his biographer Selina Hastings, Waugh restrained his instinctive hostility and coolly answered the questions put to him by Freeman, assuming what she describes as a "pose of world-weary boredom".

[182] On Easter Day, 10 April 1966, after attending a Latin Mass in a neighbouring village with members of his family, Waugh died of heart failure at his Combe Florey home, aged 62.

[185] Waugh's son, Auberon, said that the force of his father's personality was such that, despite his lack of height, "generals and chancellors of the exchequer, six-foot-six and exuding self-importance from every pore, quail[ed] in front of him".

[186] In the biographic Mad World (2009), Paula Byrne said that the common view of Evelyn Waugh as a "snobbish misanthrope" is a caricature; she asks: "Why would a man, who was so unpleasant, be so beloved by such a wide circle of friends?

Wykes describes Waugh's anti-semitism as "his most persistently noticeable nastiness", and his assumptions of white superiority as "an illogical extension of his views on the naturalness and rightness of hierarchy as the principle of social organization".

[207] Nevertheless, in the Introduction to the Complete Short Stories, Ann Pasternak Slater said that the "delineation of social prejudices and the language in which they are expressed is part of Waugh's meticulous observation of his contemporary world".

[209] As his talent developed and matured, he maintained what literary critic Andrew Michael Roberts called "an exquisite sense of the ludicrous, and a fine aptitude for exposing false attitudes".

His first two novels, Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930), comically reflect a futile society, populated by two-dimensional, basically unbelievable characters in circumstances too fantastic to evoke the reader's emotions.

[26] In the trilogy Sword of Honour (Men at Arms, 1952; Officers and Gentlemen, 1955, Unconditional Surrender, 1961) the social pervasiveness of mediocrity is personified in the semi-comical character "Trimmer", a sloven and a fraud who triumphs by contrivance.

[224] Chapter VI, "Du Côté de Chez Todd", of A Handful of Dust, with Tony Last condemned forever to read Dickens to his mad jungle captor, was thought by the critic Henry Yorke to reduce an otherwise believable book to "phantasy".

[231] Its perceived snobbery and its deference to the aristocracy were attacked by, among others, Conor Cruise O'Brien who, in the Irish literary magazine The Bell, wrote of Waugh's "almost mystical veneration" for the upper classes.

During his successful 1957 lawsuit against the Daily Express, Waugh's counsel produced figures showing total sales to that time of over four million books, two thirds in Britain and the rest in America.

Its plainly autobiographical content, Hastings suggests, gave the public a fixed image of Waugh: "stout, splenetic, red-faced and reactionary, a figure from burlesque complete with cigar, bowler hat and loud checked suit".

Although Waugh had removed embarrassing entries relating to his Oxford years and his first marriage, there was sufficient left on the record to enable enemies to project a negative image of the writer as intolerant, snobbish and sadistic, with pronounced fascist leanings.

Philip Larkin, reviewing the collection in The Guardian, thought that it demonstrated Waugh's elitism; to receive a letter from him, it seemed, "one would have to have a nursery nickname and be a member of White's, a Roman Catholic, a high-born lady or an Old Etonian novelist".