The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh

"I think Evelyn Waugh is one of the great English novelists of the 20th century and he kept this diary intermittently. A lot of it is about the absolutely amazing quantities that he drank. He started quite early in the day. It’s a document of its time. It’s full of hugely politically incorrect and, by the end, almost self-parodic episodes but it’s also brilliant at catching the moment that life is turned into art. Let me give you an example. He goes off to witness the coronation of Haile Selassie, the event that was turned into Black Mischief, and he says: ‘Monday 3rd November, 1930. Met Polish attaché whose driver had brought him to wrong address. Lunched. Wrote description barbarous gebur. Went out to see what I could barbarous gebur. 3.30 no signs barbarity.’ That is so perfect, because it captures what an awful lot of journalists do. They go with their prejudiced expectations looking for the exotic, the oriental, the ghoulish: the barbarous gebur. They write a description of it and they go out to see if they can find traces of it – but there are no signs of barbarity. At that point you are at the fork in the road. The left path leads to veracity, the Orwellian path of historical truth where you actually have to say, ‘Well, it’s a great shame but it wasn’t so barbarous after all.’ Down the right fork is the path to the novel. I’m afraid that what happens in our own time, far too often, is that people mix the two. You’ve got it. There is a brilliant example recently exposed – a journalist wrote a series of gripping reports from Tunisia in an English paper, so they sent out a photographer to photograph the journalist on the spot. It turned out that the correspondent had never checked into the hotel or taken the flight and had written this fantastic copy from the South of France. It’s straight out of Scoop . What’s great about the Waugh diaries is that he’s so beautifully, satirically conscious of all that."