Scoop - Evelyn Waugh

“Delicious!” – that is how Irina, a college friend of mine who turned me on to the wonderland of classical music, would comment on a performance she enjoyed. Yeah, “DELICIOUS” is the right word to describe my feelings about the novel. For my musical, literary and culinary delights have much in common, and it’s easy to draw a parallel among them. The dishes I relish have many nutritious ingredients, a rich taste with an exhilarating rise-and-fall of tints. They are true works of culinary art, and I wonder why we stop short of applauding as we rise from the table in a restaurant (or why, if we are that much satisfied, we do not send a ...  Read the complete review

My first introduction into Evelyn Waugh's strange world of London journalism came with watching Stephen Fry's movie adaptation of "Vile Bodies", renamed "Bright Young Things" released in the UK in 2003. What interested me was the eccentricity, not just of the variety of funny characters, but of the storyline itself, and how it twisted and turned and always felt fresh. From then on, I always had it in my mind that one day I must read "Vile Bodies", the original novel, but instead the first piece of Waugh's work I ended up reading was "Scoop", a novel I knew nothing about plotwise, and had certainly never heard ...  Read the complete review

It helps when reading this book to remember that Evelyn Waugh himself was a foreign correspondent in Abbysinnia as it then was and so this book is not only a delightful high farce but also a cutting satire. As he himself remarks in his preface, it may be hard for readers now to accept it but this is how the world was not so very long ago. In every other way the book has become more pertinent, rather than less as the years and the appetite of the public for neatly packaged and colourfully reported news has mushroomed. Now amongst the media constant self-referential conversations regarding it's own pernicious and/or preservative powers in society it is good ...  Read the complete review

The most wilfully absurd story of all Waugh's hilarious novels, a brutal satire on journalism and war which seems, in the light of News International and the media circus surrounding Kosovo, like it could have been written last week. It tells the story of William Boot, a nature journalist mistakenly dispatched to cover a foreign war, and finding himself deep in the middle of danger and political absurdity. Like 'Decline and Fall', Waugh's other Pythonesque satire, the world is depicted as a place full of buffoons and bigots, governed by the powers of random, insane fate (the wholly unsuitable war correspondent is nevertheless hugely successful, ...  Read the complete review