My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles
Alec Waugh
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: 1448201187
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Author, publisher, traveller, cricketer, lover of wine: Alec Waugh has been all these in the course of a life which has brought him a host of friends around the world. He is a warm person who knows a good friend when he sees one and is revered by all those with whom there has been mutual acceptance.
This book contains his memories of many famous writers and some figures no longer so well remembered in the period between the wars.
The section which will, no doubt, command the most attention is that devoted to the youth of his younger brother Evelyn. This throws invaluable light on the early years of a great but difficult man and reveals an insight which only one so close as a brother could have.
sentry at the bar and a bored British subaltern on picket duty. Hopkins ordered a bottle and sat down to drink it. Hopkins was a captain; the startled subaltern respectfully reminded him of the boycott. Hopkins courteously assured him that he was well aware of it and offered the subaltern a glass of wine. The picket was nonplussed and embarrassed. He would have to report the matter to a senior officer, but at half past two on a hot afternoon, senior officers were likely to be taking a siesta;
Times obituary notice, the concluding sentence of Charles Morgan’s section on Walpole in The House of Macmillan; ‘So good a story-teller is likely at any rate to live longer than many a petit maître who sneered at him as soon as he was dead.’ But with the driving of that nail home, it is probable that more and more readers will join Anthony West in a mistaken identification of Alroy Kear with Walpole, so that Walpole will be recalled not as the author of The Herries Chronicle but as a minor
opened his attack with his second and third change bowlers. At tea, with the score at 165 for two, he explained his plan. ‘I thought I would get two or three quick wickets, then loose my good bowlers, when they were fresh, against the tail.’ He enjoyed bowling, and some maintained that his tactics in the field were dictated by the subconscious need to create a situation when he would be justified in putting himself on to bowl. He had, as a bowler, some curious idiosyncrasies. The average
enjoyed the back-stage politics, the small lunch and dinner parties that members of the Sette gave each other when they were plotting a palace revolution, smoothing out a difficulty or electing the next year’s officers. These parties because they were convened for a purpose created a genuine link between the four or six men who were grouped round a table. We shared a fraternal bond. During the 1930s I became friendly with several men of eminence in the law and medicine whom otherwise I could
table on the left of the desk was occupied by a small thin man in his later fifties, with a short clipped moustache and closely cut hair that was turning grey. He wore a dark suit that had been cut for him in Savile Row, a stiff white collar with a plain silk or satin tie and a pearl pin. He had a Continental air. He arrived at a quarter to one, alone. He would order a dry martini and light a cigarette which he smoked through a long holder; four places were laid at his table, and by the time he