Evelyn Waugh was the son of a publisher and literary critic. He had an older brother, the writer Alec Waugh. At school, Waugh drank heavily and was believed to sleep with other young men. He spent a term at Heatherley's Art School, London, but took a job as a school teacher at a remote prep school. In 1928, he published his first two books, soon followed by a series of best-selling comic novels,
Decline and Fall,
Vile Bodies (1930), and
Black Mischief (1932), the last inspired by Ethiopia, where an Oxford friend had become Emperor. In the Second World War, he joined
… More the Royal Marines and later the Royal Horse Guards, and in 1944 was injured in Yugoslavia. On leave, he wrote Brideshead Revisited (1945), a long novel looking back on his youth. He retired to Somerset, bought a small estate and played at being a country gentleman. A book of memoirs called A Little Learning appeared in 1964, shortly before his death.
