First published in 1967, this tells of an Author, publisher, traveller, cricketer, lover of wine: Alec Waugh has been all these in the course of a life which has brought him a host of friends around the world. He is a warm person who knows a good friend when he sees one and is revered by all those with whom there has been mutual acceptance. This book contains his memories of many famous writers and some figures no longer so well remembered in the period between the wars. The section which will, no doubt, command the most attention is that devoted to the youth of his younger brother Evelyn. This throws invaluable light on the early years of a great but difficult man and reveals an insight which only one so close as a brother could have.
First published in 1931, this is not the only one of Alec Waugh's novels in which he has described the agonies of a couple who are desperately in love but cannot marry, for it is a situation that he has himself lived through. But it is in this novel that he has drawn most specifically upon experiences he has only alluded to in other books. His protagonist is Gordon Carruthers, who was also the hero of The Loom of Youth, that then shocking and revelatory novel of public-school life. Now transformed into a globe-trotting writer, Carruthers falls in love with a beautiful American socialite, and eventually, while her husband is away, they begin an affair. For reasons that only gradually become clear, their situation seems to be a cul-de-sac, leading to a denouement that is both surprising and, paradoxically, the only possible one. So Lovers Dream is an autobiographical novel in more ways than one. Into it Waugh put not only his love affair but his home, his literary agent, the details of his own life. This makes it both an enthralling tale and a candid self-revelation, and as always in this writer's work, an affectionate evocation of a time he has lived through.
First published in 1928, Nor Many Waters is typical Alec Waugh in its charm and grace, and its shrewd perception of human emotions and profound exploration of human relationships.
The bright summer sun faded into the shimmering Mediterranean as the young American painter began what was to be the five most perfect hours of his lifetime. It would be more than just an affair, a passionate encounter, and yet it would come to nothing. It would be a period of total enchantment that would remain to haunt him for the rest of his life, affecting his career, his code of behaviour, his entire existence. He sensed all this and yet he went to her, this woman he loved, this woman who could never be his...
First published in 1961, this collection of Thirteen stories has been compiled as Alec Waugh looked back over his career as an author, and takes from his writing those which he feels are amongst his most personal creations, bringing them together into a panorama. Told in the first person, My Place in the Bazaar represents Waugh's varied experience and view of life as his enchanting stories take place in a variety of world-wide settings.
In the manner and method of Hot Countries and Most Women, in which personal narrative and opinion are woven together with fiction, Mr. Waugh travels through a period and brilliantly pictures the post-war times and tries to explain what has happened to the war generation. He shows a topsy-turvy world. He tells anecdotes and stories with his unfailing charm. He has been courageous in his deductions and provocative in his suggestions as he turns from physical travel to spiritual interpretation.
If you enjoyed the powerful atmosphere of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby you may just have an inkling of the smoothly professional efficacy of Alec Waugh's The Fatal Gift. First published in 1973, this novel breathes the values and attitudes of the early decades of the 20th century. Raymond Peronne has wealth, is bright, is devastatingly attractive to women: his fatal gift. Second son of a baronet, Perronne goes to Oxford (from which he is rusticated), then to New York (in the'20s and '30s) and is in Egypt during the war (moving in circles then, as in this novel, inhabited by such as Evelyn Waugh, Claud Cockburn and Robin Maugham.). In tense anticipation we watch Peronne, for whom good fortune seems always imminent, fall at every point-until he finds the isle of Dominica and begins a love affair the like of which he has never known.
First published in 1975, this tells of one of the Bright Young Things in that brilliant and stimulating era between the wars, Alec Waugh remembers 1931 as being a year of firsts. It was the year he attended his first garden party, the year he made his first transatlantic phone call, the year he became a member of the MCC. But it was also a year that marked the end of one epoch and the beginning of another, far less frivolous. Nostalgic for the best of that time, Alec Waugh recalls the writers he knew and met here and in America - Somerset Maugham, A J Cronin, John O'Hara, Thurber and Dorothy Parker. Here is an insight into the literary and publishing world of the thirties through an account of the author's own experiences. We hear of Alec Waugh's life at leisure with stories of his family and brother Evelyn, his affairs (with Ruth in California, with Mary in Villefranche, with Elizabeth in London), the wild parties, the tours round the speakeasies, the Atlantic crossings and the fascinating people he met on them.
First published in 1933, this tale describes how events that take place in an obscure oil-surveyor's camp in the French West Indies act as the link and the catalyst for three desperate groups of people thousands of miles apart - in London, New York and the picturesque old quarter of New Orleans. Upon often trivial acts depends matters of life and love and death, and as always Alec Waugh has distilled the drama and the truth from a wide spectrum of characters and situations. The fascination of this novel is that it is, in effect, a game of global consequences.
Alec Waugh, who served in the last war as a regular army officer, was recalled to his regiment in September 1939. After a few months of regimental duties he has filled a succession of Junior Staff appointment, with the B.E.F. in France, in London during the Blitz, with the M.E.F in Syria and Egypt and latterly with the Persia and Iraq command. This book is the narrative of his four years in khaki. It makes no attempt to be sensational, but the range and variety of those experiences have provided ample scope for that capacity to convey character, atmosphere and landscape which has made Alec Waugh so popular a novelist.
The man who asks a woman what she wants deserves all that's coming to him!" This was Melanie's viewpoint and she always knew exactly what she wanted. Julia was different. She worked in a dress shop and she was often disturbed about her younger sister's morals. Both head strong, their differing character traits meant that their parents didn't know what to make of either of them. Here, against a background of smart and not-so-smart London we see the business girl and the girl-about-town meeting their difficulties in sex and in the daily routine.
First published in 1964, this book tells how what Columbus started in 1492 was finished in 1898, when the red and gold flag was lowered at Havana to mark the end of four centuries of Spanish dominance in the Caribbean. For two and a half centuries after the Pope divided the world between Spain and Portugal, the navies of Britain, France, Spain and occasionally the Netherlands fought in the Caribbean. Most of the islands changed hands at least once. Europe discovered the delights of coffee, tea and cocoa; sugar boomed; fortunes were made and lost; the slave trade flourished. But after the Napoleonic Wars prosperity receded, the conscience of the world awoke and slavery was abolished, ending the halcyon days of European colonialism in the Indies. A Family of Islands is full of fabulous people: Drake, Hawkins, Raleigh, Philip II of Spain, Elizabeth I; Henry Morgan, the pirate who was later knighted and made governor of Jamaica; Haiti's tragic trio: Toussaint L'Ouverture, Dessalines and Henri Christophe. It is full of stories about witch doctors and obeah spells and the unspeakable abominations of the slave trade. With a sure sense of the exciting, Alec Waugh has written a perceptive and entertaining account of the history and humanity of a vivid part of the world where life can be as tranquil as a sunbeam or as tumultuous as a hurricane.
First published in 1960, this is a tale of an imaginary island on the Equator that has suddenly achieved importance through the discovery of oil - what will happen to the men and women living under the tensions of life on this island? At one end of this island is the oil refinery where the members of the staff live in constant proximity to one another, and where emotions are heightened by the lack of privacy. The men are goaded by ambitions for power, while the women are drawn into affairs of love and passion. At the other end of the island is a hotbed of politics where a British diplomat is attempting to retain the island under Britain's sphere of influence; where an ailing king is fearful of what will happen when he is succeeded by a young and untrained prince; where a nationalist group is plotting to overthrow the monarchy and seize the oil fields. Waugh handles brilliantly his political plots, but always interwoven with them are the personal dramas of love and fear, of cowardice and courage. Rich in detail and characterisation, and in the exotic colours and customs of this strange land, the novel has constant suspense and variety.
First published in 1957, this tells of Santa Marta, which to the casual visitor is a sub-tropical paradise, a small sister of Jamaica, Bermuda and Nassau, unmentioned in the colour-splashed brochures of travel agents: an island where the sun shines throughout the year on the sandy beaches of innumerable coves, on the cane-fields and coconut plantations, on the shingled hits of the peasant villages and the fine houses of the white planters handed down through generation after generation, from the Sugar Barons of a past century. But this was not how the newspaper columnist, Bradshaw, saw it when he arrived on his first trip to the Caribbean. Bradshaw found Santa Marta a smouldering volcano. This novel is a brilliantly successful evocation of the atmosphere and the problems of life on a West Indian island. It is a dramatic story, packed with incident and thrilling in this mounting tension. It weaves into the fortunes of a small group of islanders the ambitions and jealousies, the hopes and fears, the complexes and inhibitions of a people to whom the tint of the skin is more important than wealth, or power, or skill, whose tangled history has bequeathed a heritage of passion in an island where the blood never cools.
First published in 1930, this discursive and absorbing travel-book offers, as the author says in his new Foreword, "a picture of a way of living that exists no longer." Hot Countries tells of a series of journeys in the Far East, the West Indies and the South Sea Islands when he was a young and light-hearted novelist seeking colour, romance and adventure.
First published in 1975, this story tells of how a chance meeting in a café, a piece of grit delicately removed by a gentleman from a lady's eye give birth to an affair... a brief yet unrelenting emotional tug-of-war between two people whose spontaneous desire clashes head-on with the 'facts' of their existence. There is Anna, married to Graham and happily content with her home life and two children. There is Alec, trapped in a loveless marriage to cool, uninvolved Melanie, looking to his work as a doctor for fulfillment. Between them a flame is kindled that splendidly ignites a passion way beyond the well-constructed limits of their imaginations. Then comes the test. Can they transform their dream into a lasting love or must it founder on the hard rocks of reality? Brief Encounter is also a major film starring Sophia Loren and Richard Burton
First published in 1951, this is part sentimental journey revisiting old well-loved scenes of former travels, and part search for new, out-of-the-way lands, Alec Waugh's travel book tells of a journey half-way round the world. But in new or old places, the author's sense of romance and adventure, his gift of combining past and present, his ability to create a mood and tell a story provide continuously enlightening and enlivening reading. The chief object of these travels was to visit the Seychelles Islands. This remote British colony, lost in the immensity of the Indian Ocean, is a world forgotten by the world, a world in itself. Alec Waugh's description of these tropical islands, their people and their history, ranks among the best of travel writing.
First published in 1917, this semi-autobiographical work tells the story of Gordon Caruthers' schooldays at the English public school, Fenhurst. From his confusion and isolation, through rebellious school escapades and relationships with fellow students, Alec Waugh reveals his own deep criticism of a system forcing pupils to conform to flawed ideals, and the inevitable consequences of thrusting thirteen year old children and eighteen year old adolescents together. The book caused a storm of controversy at the time and was banned in many schools. Today it can be rightly seen as a controversial comment on public school life, and a classic.
In this rich and engrossing biography of Thomas Lipton, Alec Waugh has recreated the fascinating and complex figure of a man who became a legend in his own lifetime, a millionaire before he was forty, an unofficial ambassador at large, and an unforgettable sportsman to millions of people. The son of a struggling grocer, Lipton, while still a boy, showed the business acumen that was later to make him millions by expanding his father's small store into a vast network of shops. A love of the sea had been with him from childhood, and yacht racing became the guiding passion of his later years. In 1898 he issued his first Cup challenge and brought Shamrock J to America. By this time Lipton's business enterprises had made him into an international figure. Then a curious thing happened. He bought five successive Shamrocks to America and saw every one of them go down in defeat. Yet each defeat seemed only to brighten Sir Thomas's popularity and prestige. He became, without ever winning, a symbol of the American ideal of sportsmanship. Never better than in this biography, Alec Waugh has caught the excitement, colour, and romance of a busy and successful life.
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