Thursday, March 31, 2005

"Period Piece" by Evelyn Waugh

Elderly Lady Amelia is mad about novels and sincerely taxes her assistant, Miss Myers, with demands for more. Miss Myers dares to voice an opinion about one of the books she has read to her employer, who is forthwith inspired to tell a tale of her own . Read by Jonathan Strong.

Stop if you think Brideshead Revisited is the best and most lasting of Evelyn Waugh's many published works; actually, his very best work (in our humble opinion) is in his more comic novels and short stories, of which this is a fairly early example. Waugh dominated several decades of English letters in the twentieth century and has since gone in out of fashion with some regularity. He was considered a master in the construction of the perfect sentence, and we are not inclined to disagree.

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