About Evelyn Waugh as a novelist: It is certain that he was a master in the hardheaded and militant tradition of English social comedy, of which both wit and the fantasies of malice are the graces, even the cement. He appeared as the immediate successor of the Saki of "The Unbearable Bassington," of Max Beerbohm, of the hilarious fairy tales of Wodehouse and the romantic flightiness of Firbank. Their comfort had been savaged by the 1914 war, and Waugh's line was the comedy of outrage. (Our own sour "black" comedy was yet to come.) But as a man—what was he? Like his father before him, as we can guess from the son's brief autobiography, "A Little Learning," and from a large selection of his … [correspondence in "The Letters of Evelyn Waugh,"] Waugh was a born actor and impersonator, with a bent for exaggeration and caricature and a delight in the inadmissible….

Waugh's many selves and persistent impersonations are candidly and divertingly projected in his letters. He has the naturalness of the best letter writers…. His spell as a letter writer lies in his gift for changing his tone to beguile or tease most of his correspondents. He knows that a good letter must have some of the inconsequence of talk. (p. 109)

In his talking style, he has Bryon's art of slipping into one-line asides. Olivia Plunket-Greene—an early flame of his schoolmastering days—is in 1948 "stark mad. She broke her arm writing a letter." About Heralds: "All Heralds stammer." Randolph Churchill is three times as fat as before. Since the Budget, all the members of White's are yelling that they are ruined, except the really rich, who now sit apart smoking their pipes, because they turned themselves into registered companies in Costa Rica. (p. 110)

The last letter in this volume, written ten days before his death, was to Lady Mosley…. As the letter proceeds, he slips in one of those news flashes of gossip which the best letter writers know will make their correspondents laugh: "John Sutro had hallucinations of poverty and was cured by electric shock."…

One understands why these letters are so enjoyable: it is because Waugh treats society as a Wonderland in which he plays the part of a rude, libellous, yet domestic Alice. (p. 114)