A Scribbler in Soho: A Celebration of Auberon Waugh

edited by Naim Attallah Quartet 300pp £20 The Week Bookshop £15.99

The name Auberon Waugh won’t mean much to members of the younger generation, said Roger Lewis in The Times. Yet were they to come across him, they would “instantly” ban him. “Never can there have been a writer more likely to be pinioned and blackened by no-platforming, Twitter storms of disgust and opprobrium, and snowflake heebie-jeebies.” The “blisteringly prolific” Waugh spent his life writing gleefully provocative pieces for publications such as Private Eye, The Spectator and The Oldie. And as this “wonderful anthology” of his work shows, he was a truly great writer: a prose stylist “easily” the equal of his father, Evelyn; a satirist on a par with Swift and Sterne.

That’s quite an exaggeration, said John Carey in The Sunday Times. In person, Waugh may have been kind and considerate, but as a writer he was mostly “detestable”. Prejudice took the place of thought in his pieces: modern art was “rubbish”; feminism and Aids were “two plagues”; politicians were “social cripples”. It’s true Waugh had a “split personality”, said William Cook in The Spectator: he was a “demon on the page and an angel off it”. Yet just because his writings were intended to rile, that doesn’t mean they didn’t have an underlying seriousness. “Even his most outlandish opinions contained a grain of truth.” Naim Attallah, who has compiled this volume, was a close friend of Waugh’s and the proprietor of the Literary Review (which Waugh edited from 1986 until his death in 2001). Attallah’s selections are rather “odd”, and his introduction is “rambling” and self-indulgent. Even so, this book is a “welcome addition” to our understanding of a truly fascinating man. “It would be very difficult to produce a bad or boring book about Auberon Waugh.”