Evelyn Waugh

Before his death, Waugh transferred the copyright of his works to a trust fund for his children which he called The Save the Children Fund.

His novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) was adapted for television in 1981 and made into a film in 2008.

During the Second World War, Waugh served in the Royal Marines and the Royal Horse Guards and saw active service in Dakar (West Africa), Libya, Crete, and Yugoslavia.

He had seven children, who included the writer and journalist Auberon Waugh.

Biographies of Waugh include those by Frances Donaldson (1967), Christopher Sykes (1975), Martin Stannard (1987 and 1994), Selina Hastings (1994) and Douglas Lane Patey (1998).

The American critic William F. Buckley, Jr. called Waugh "the greatest English novelist of the century".

Waugh's short novel The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy (1948) is about the funeral business in Los Angeles.

His father Arthur Waugh and his brother Alec Waugh were also writers.

His work included biographies of St Edmund Campion, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Ronald Knox.

His The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), a novel about a man's descent into madness, was largely autobiographical.

His two wives were both grand-daughters of the 4th Earl of Carnarvon.

Waugh's first wife was also called Evelyn, so they were known to their friends as "He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn".

For a short time in his youth he was apprenticed to a cabinet-maker.

Waugh claimed in his autobiography that in 1925 he had tried to kill himself by swimming out to sea, but had swum back to the shore after being stung by a jellyfish.

When Waugh was asked if he had ever competed in any sport for his Oxford college, his answer was "I drank for Hertford."