“His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz — everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime.” (Evelyn Waugh - The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold)
The same could be said of Waugh himself. He had a reputation as "the nastiest-tempered man in England,” but he was also one of England’s greatest writers. Some of Waugh’s most well-known novels are Handful of Dust, The Loved One and Brideshead Revisited. Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism in 1930 after a long intellectual and spiritual search, having previously described himself at times as an atheist and a skeptic. He believed that the Catholic Church’s universality, discipline, and firm moral teachings offered a coherent response to what he saw as the disorder and materialism of the modern world.
When Edwin Newman made a short film about Waugh in 1956, he encountered a writer who seemed almost stranded in the twentieth century. Waugh openly lamented the modern world, saying he would have preferred to live two or three hundred years earlier. He shunned the telephone and the automobile and remained devoted to writing with an old-fashioned dip pen.
