SOURCE: “Four More Entertainments, 1942–1953,” in Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of an Artist, Chapman & Hall LTD, 1958, pp. 136–42, 152–57.

In the following excerpt, Stopp discusses Scott-King's Modern Europe and Love Among the Ruins, which he finds to be sad but humorous, and lacking in brutality or sentimentalism.

Scott-King's Modern Europe is a sad little story, finely wrought and economical in its effects, but sad. Superficially it owed its origin to a visit to Spain, where Mr Waugh joined in the celebrations in the summer of 1945 for the tercentenary of Vittoria, at Salamanca, and had his first experience of the machinery of official hospitality in the post-war world. But it contains his first reflections on the wider scene of mid-twentieth century Europe. Even without the footnote that ‘The Republic of Neutralia is imaginary and composite and represents no existing state’, we should recognize overtones of Jugoslavia and the Dalmatian coast, and the wider...