Everyone knows how funny Evelyn Waugh is. One of his finest comic creations was his own increasingly rebarbative public persona - a self-confessed 'front of pomposity mitigated by indiscretion, that was as hard, bright and antiquated as a cuirass'. No wonder new biographies of Waugh are popular. The life and work cannot be separated. Gathered productively at the writer's desk are the chaotic and often bizarre details of Waugh's own life, what he called the 'adroit jigsaw' of his unobtrusively elegant aesthetic structures, and his moral coherence. This study shows how Waugh transformed his own experiences into painfully comic, brilliantly constructed novels. They are works, in his own words, of 'elegance and variety of contrivance'. Ann Pasternak Slater has written an ingenious and engaging study of the relationship between Waugh's life and work, between his sharp moral vision and Dionysiac comic genius. She focuses on Waugh's entire fictional oeuvre in a book notable for its intelligent sympathy.

The Vivien Eliot Papers is a groundbreaking new biography of Vivien Eliot, comprising two sections: her Life and her Papers. Based on a rich repository of primary evidence, much only recently uncovered, it corrects the accidental inaccuracies and deliberate distortions that have circulated around one of Bloomsbury's most gossiped-about, enigmatic couples, while unveiling fascinating new discoveries that give a more balanced understanding of both partners. For the first time, too, immaculate texts of Vivien's own writing are presented, carefully distinguished from Eliot's input, which demonstrate a fresh and wry talent all of her own.

This introduction to Waugh s complete fiction devotes a chapter to each of his novels in chronological order, providing a lucid outline of his creative and spiritual trajectory from carefree unbeliever to committed Catholic, from modernist to traditionalist, from comic satirist to ironic realist. The critical analysis of each novel is preceded by a biographical introduction with an unprecedented focus on apparently trivial experiences in Waugh s life which had a significant impact on the themes, images, and structures peculiar to that novel. Waugh always rated his linguistic and structural craft as a novelist above the generally admired criteria of characterisation and psychological realism inherited from the nineteenth century novel. This study aims to show exactly how ingeniously and wittily his novels are constructed, and how vitally his art is allied to his profoundly moral vision. It is an energetic apologia for an author commonly accepted as a comic stylist, and denigrated as a reactionary bigot of unspeakable opinions."

E. M. Forster's beloved Italian novels, now in a single hardcover volume.
Forster's most memorably romantic exploration of the liberating effects of Italy on the English, "A Room with a View" follows the carefully chaperoned Lucy Honeychurch to Florence. There she meets the unconventional George Emerson and finds herself inspired by his refreshingly free spirit-- which puts her in mind of "a room with a view"--to escape the claustrophobic snobbery of her guardians back in England. The wicked tragicomedy "Where Angels Fear to Tread" chronicles a young English widow's trip to Italy and its messy aftermath. When Lilia Herriton impulsively marries a penniless Italian and then dies in childbirth, her first husband's family sets out to rescue the child from his "uncivilized" surroundings. But in ways that they can't possibly imagine, their narrow preconceptions will be upended by the rich and varied charms of Forster's cherished Italy.