Beautiful Books will be publishing in September a new biography of Evelyn Waugh by Duncan McLaren, Evelyn!: Rhapsody for an Obsessive Love
Duncan McLaren, the acclaimed biographer of Enid Blyton, here turns his attention to Evelyn Waugh, charting a very personal course through Waugh’s life, up until the writing and publication of his final novel, Unconditional Surrender.
Adopting the same disruptive and inquisitive approach as his previous works, McLaren manages to produce an entirely new portrait of Evelyn Waugh to those painted by more traditional recent biographies.
Beginning with his own personal obsession with Decline and Fall, McLaren embarks on a real journey with his partner Kate to many of the key places in Waugh’s life, discovering along the way new insights into the triangular relationship between Waugh, his wife Evelyn Gardner and the man she left him for, John Heygate.
Both sympathetic and inimitably curious, McLaren manages to bring one of our greatest writers to life in a completely unorthodox, but very literary, manner.
