Unless the telephone is uninvented, [The Letters of Evelyn Waugh] will probably be the last collection of letters by a great writer to be also a great collection of letters…. [It] is a wonderfully entertaining volume—even more so, in fact, than the Diaries. Here is yet one more reason to thank Evelyn Waugh for his hatred of the modern world. If he had not loathed the telephone, he might have talked all this away….

Waugh was unhappy about himself, and on this evidence he had every right to be. People who want to emphasize his repellent aspects will find plenty to help them here. For one thing, he reveled in his contempt for Jews, which in his correspondence he usually spelled with a small "j" unless he was being polite to one of them for some professional reason…. If there was ever anything playfully outrageous about this...