William Boot is a fictional journalist who is the protagonist in the 1938 Evelyn Waugh comic novel Scoop.
Boot is the young author of a regular column on country life for a London newspaper named the Daily Beast.
His affected style is typified in the notorious sentence "Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole".
[1] Deedes himself said he "spent part of my life brushing aside the charge," but admitted "that my inexperience and naivety as a reporter in Africa might have contributed a few bricks to the building of Boot.
[3] Yet another suggested candidate as the model for Boot was the Daily Mail's gardening correspondent for 50 years, Percy Izzard (1877-1968).