Comedian and author Alexei Sayle names Waugh’s Sword of Honour as the book that has been most important to him. The selection appears in yesterday’s Glasgow Herald:
Name: Alexei Sayle
Latest Book: Thatcher Stole My Trousers
A Book That Made Me: The Sword of Honour Trilogy by Evelyn Waugh.
I always loved Evelyn Waugh from the first time I read Decline and Fall even though he was a right-wing alcoholic who hated the working class. The Sword of Honour Trilogy though is his masterpiece, a trio of books relating the wartime experiences of Guy Crouchback, priggish and diffident officer in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. Blissfully funny and irredeemably tragic, the finest evocation of the wasteful and perverted nature of warfare. If I ever went on Celebrity Mastermind (which I never will) my specialist subject would be the Sword of Honour trilogy.
