In last week’s Independent on Sunday, columnist and novelist D J Taylor mentioned three Waughs in his column. He was discussing the hardships worked on the children of successful parents as they sought to find their own careers. After discussing the children of Kurt Cobain, Charles Dickens and Kingsley Amis, he reached the Waughs:
Some aspirants find the whole business of working in the family business too unnerving and go off at a tangent – Auberon Waugh, for example, who after a handful of novels gave up any attempt to emulate his father Evelyn and settled for being a highly distinguished journalist… [The experience of Cobain’s daughter] is reminiscent of the career of Vyvyan Holland (1886-1967), the younger son of Oscar Wilde, who as his friend Alec Waugh once delicately put it “detested notoriety as much as his father had delighted in it”.
