Remote People

Description

One of four of Waugh's early travel books Remote People records the author's trip to Ethiopia in 1930 to cover the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie, followed by a tour of the Aden Protectorate, Zanzibar and the Belgian Congo and Cape Town. Full of arresting sketches of fellow travellers and others, including a character who would not have been out of place in one of Waugh's own novels, an eccentric professor of Byzantine art who was 'a mine of impressive misinformation'.

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.

An outrageously disdainful, wonderfully funny account ... he wrote like an angel - a fallen one * Irish Times *