Among ancestors bearing the Waugh name, the Rev. Distinguished relatives included Lord Cockburn (1779–1854), a leading Scottish advocate and judge, William Morgan (1750–1833), a pioneer of actuarial science who served the Equitable Life Assurance Society for 56 years, and Philip Henry Gosse (1810–1888), a natural scientist who became notorious through his depiction as a religious fanatic in his son Edmund's memoir Father and Son.

John Waugh was born on 28 October 1903 to Arthur Waugh (1866–1943) and Catherine Charlotte Raban (1870–1954), into a family with English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish and Huguenot origins. Lord Cockburn, the Scottish judge, was one of Waugh's great-great-grandfathers.Īrthur Evelyn St. After his death in 1966, he acquired a following of new readers through the film and television versions of his works, such as the television serial Brideshead Revisited (1981). He displayed to the world a mask of indifference, but he was capable of great kindness to those whom he considered his friends. That blow to his religious traditionalism, his dislike for the welfare state culture of the postwar world, and the decline of his health all darkened his final years, but he continued to write. His traditionalist stance led him to strongly oppose all attempts to reform the Church, and the changes by the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) greatly disturbed his sensibilities, especially the introduction of the vernacular Mass. Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930 after his first marriage failed.

Waugh's detachment was such that he fictionalised his own mental breakdown which occurred in the early 1950s. He was a perceptive writer who used the experiences and the wide range of people whom he encountered in his works of fiction, generally to humorous effect. He served in the British armed forces throughout the Second World War, first in the Royal Marines and then in the Royal Horse Guards. He travelled extensively in the 1930s, often as a special newspaper correspondent he reported from Abyssinia at the time of the 1935 Italian invasion. As a young man, he acquired many fashionable and aristocratic friends and developed a taste for country house society. He worked briefly as a schoolmaster before he became a full-time writer. Waugh was the son of a publisher, educated at Lancing College and then at Hertford College, Oxford.

He is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century. His most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), the novel Brideshead Revisited (1945), and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour (1952–1961). John Waugh ( / ˈ iː v l ɪ n ˈ s ɪ n dʒ ən ˈ w ɔː/ 28 October 1903 – 10 April 1966) was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer.

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