Episode Details

In this episode of pplpod, we dive into the chaotic and brilliant life of Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, recognized as one of the 20th century's greatest English prose stylists. We trace his journey from a bullying schoolboy to a dissipated Oxford student who left university without a degree after embracing the "Hypocrites' Club" lifestyle.

Join us as we discuss:

• The "Bright Young People": How his early social life and failed marriage to Evelyn Gardner—which led friends to call the couple "He-Evelyn" and "She-Evelyn"—fueled early satiric hits like Vile Bodies.
• Conversion and Controversy: His shocking conversion to Catholicism in 1930 and his travels to Abyssinia, which inspired the journalistic satire Scoop.
• War and Brideshead: His unpopular stint as a WWII officer, where he was deemed "unemployable" due to his insubordinate nature, and how he wrote his most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited, while on unpaid leave.
• The "Crusty Colonel": His later years marked by a drug-induced mental breakdown, a hatred of modern church reforms, and a reputation so fierce that one contemporary called him "the nastiest-tempered man in England".

Whether you know him as a literary genius or a "snobbish misanthrope," this episode unpacks the complex man behind the mask of indifference.