One last excerpt from Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags before we move on to other things. I haven’t read all of Waugh by any means, but each time I come back to him I am knocked out by his economy and subtlety. There is so much humour in the writing, the wit so dry — such a blessed relief after an evening with David Sedaris at the Chan Centre. Sedaris is an undeniably funny writer, but subtlety is not his strong suit: a sledge hammer compared to the “snick” of Waugh’s stiletto.

Here “Old Rampole” (of the publishing firm Rampole and Bentley) who, “at, to be exact, the age of sixty-two, [has] suddenly discovered the delights of light literature”:

There was an author on the list of his firm of whom [Rampole’s partner] Mr. Bentley was slightly ashamed. She wrote under the name of Ruth Mountdragon, a pseudonym which hid the identity of a Mrs. Parker. Every year for seventeen years Mrs. Parker had written a novel dealing with the domestic adventures of a different family; radically different that is to say in name, exhibiting minor differences of composition and circumstance, but spiritually as indistinguishable as larches; they all had the qualities of “charm”; once it was a colonel’s family of three girls in reduced circumstances on a chicken farm, once it was an affluent family on a cruise in the Adriatic, once a newly-married doctor in Hampstead; all the permutations and combinations of upper-middle-class life had been methodically exploited for seventeen years; but the charm was constant.