When the Going Was Good

Description

Between 1929 and 1935 Evelyn Waugh travelled widely and wrote four books about his experiences. In this collection he writes about a cruise around the Mediterranean, a train trip from Djibouti to Abyssinia to attend Emperor Haile Selassie's coronation in 1930, his travels in Aden, Zanzibar, Kenya and the Congo, coping with heat and mosquitoes, a journey to Guyana and Brazil, and his return to Addis Ababa in 1935 to report on the war between Abyssinia and Italy. Waugh's experiences gave him the ideas for such novels as "Scoop" and "White Mischief".

Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he also travelled extensively and converted to Catholicism. In 1939 Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, experiences which informed his Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61). His most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was written while on leave from the army. Waugh died in 1966.

[a] humorous account of an agreeable young man's peregrinations in picturesque lands * The New York Times *