Evelyn Waugh belongs in the select company of Swift and Twain and a very few others in English literature's Pantheon of Haters. Newspaper editors apparently kept Waugh's corrosive juices flowing by assigning the ever-hard-up author such topics as "Why Glorify Youth?"…. and, as a dyspeptic young man, he reciprocated by writing, for example, of the English girl, "how one longs to give you a marron glacé, a light kiss and put you under the chair, with the puppies and kittens who are your true associates." But this is mere bull-in-the-china shop iconoclasm. Age and piety only made Waugh more ferocious, as in his jeremiad against Stephen Spender: "to see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sèvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee."

This is the Waugh most of us know. But this fine selection of his journalism [A Little Order], most of it dashed off for a quick buck, shows him, if anything, a finer appreciator than derogator. His paeans to late Victorian furniture, architecture and design show a profound familiarity with the subjects and rapturous attachments to the objects. Better still are his brief reviews in praise of neglected authors, including P. G. Wodehouse, Max Beerbohm, Henry Green, Ronald Firbank and Angus Wilson. Here Waugh proves himself too dedicated a craftsman to let prejudice stand in the way of judgment. Though he predictably discards D. H. Lawrence, "who wrote squalidly," he speaks of Hemingway as "a master"—"lucid and individual and euphonious."

Though written over a period of 40 years, these 55 articles show a fixity of taste and outlook almost unheard of in journalism. Waugh ever delighted in extending generally repugnant ideas to their most unpleasant conclusion, and these essays continually find him playing Swiss Guard to a demoralized aristocracy. In an introduction to a suitably reactionary book by one T. A. McInerny, he even advocates a society based on four estates—monarchy, aristocracy, "industry and scholarship," and manual labor. Have any of our contemporary conservatives the courage of such medieval convictions?