Auberon Waugh Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family Background
Auberon Alexander Waugh emerged into the British literary world with a name that already carried the weight of a canon. Born in 1939 in Somerset, he was the eldest son of the celebrated novelist Evelyn Waugh and Laura (nee Herbert). The household into which he arrived was Catholic, traditional, and steeped in letters and argument. The example set by Evelyn Waugh loomed over the family, shaping Auberon's sensibility even as he grew determined to cultivate a voice utterly his own. His mother, Laura, provided a quieter steadiness, shielding the children from the turbulence of public attention and the demands of a famous father. The family made its home in the West Country, a landscape that would remain part of Auberon's identity and later his daily life.

Education, Early Setback, and First Books
Educated at Downside, a leading English Catholic school, Auberon Waugh encountered both the intellectual rigors and the dry wit that would characterize his prose. As a young man he undertook National Service, where a severe and nearly fatal machine-gun accident left lasting injuries. The episode, often retold with mordant humor, cut short any military ambitions but propelled him rapidly toward writing. Convalescence brought discipline and perspective, and by his early twenties he had already published satirical fiction. The Foxglove Saga and, later, Who Are the Violets Now? announced a novelist with a waspish eye for hypocrisy and social pretension. While fiction would never be his principal livelihood, these early books established the comic and combative manner that he refined in journalism.

Journalism and Public Voice
Waugh's reputation rests above all on his journalism. He wrote for the Spectator, the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, and, with special notoriety, for Private Eye. In the pages of the Spectator he perfected the diary form, a blend of high-spirited mischief, high-church conservatism, and moral indignation directed at humbug. At Private Eye, encouraged by satirists such as Richard Ingrams, he became a scourge of public cant, publishing a diarist's column that mixed gossip, vendetta, and often hilarious invective. Over successive Spectator editors, including Alexander Chancellor and Charles Moore, Waugh remained a star turn, a columnist whose byline indicated provocation, elegance, and a fierce independence of mind.

Editor of Literary Review
In the mid-1980s Waugh accepted the editorship of the Literary Review, where his appetite for mischief and his defense of literary standards found institutional form. He used the magazine to champion lively criticism and to deflate pomposity, culminating in the creation of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award in the early 1990s. The prize, instantly famous, was intended not as prudery but as a protest against overwrought prose and self-importance. It became a cultural fixture and a neat emblem of Waugh's method: to defend taste by lampooning excess.

Politics, Causes, and Campaigns
Waugh was an instinctive small-c conservative, a Catholic who distrusted utopian schemes and official zealotry. He prized eccentricity, private life, and the old liberties. His political interventions were often comic in form but serious in purpose. Most memorably, he stood in the 1979 general election for the Dog Lovers' Party in North Devon, a satirical challenge aimed at Jeremy Thorpe during the Thorpe affair. The campaign, puckish and pointed, exemplified Waugh's belief that ridicule can be a disinfectant in public life. He brought similar energies to European questions and to the defense of press freedom, arguing that the best cure for bad ideas is sunlight and mockery.

Style, Beliefs, and Influence
Waugh's prose was lucid, musical, and armed with a sting. He wrote as a moralist who distrusted moralism, preferring jokes to hectoring and understatement to declamation. He belonged to a generation of British columnists who treated the newspaper column as a literary form, and he sustained a persona that mixed hauteur with self-mockery. His Catholicism, like his father's, informed his worldview, though he wore it lightly. Friends and colleagues from Private Eye and the Spectator recalled a loyal, combative ally who did not trim his sails to fashion. Even those who suffered his barbs conceded the distinction of his style.

Personal Life
Auberon Waugh married Teresa (nee Onslow), who became known as the novelist and translator Teresa Waugh. They made their home in Somerset, at and around Combe Florey, long associated with the Waugh family. The couple raised children who pursued their own lives in letters and journalism, notably Alexander Waugh, who later chronicled the family, and Daisy Waugh, a journalist and novelist. Domestic life and the West Country landscape grounded him: the rhythms of family, a garden, a parish, and the droll complications of rural politics threaded through his writing. The bond with Laura Waugh remained a foundational affection after the death of Evelyn Waugh, and the family's literary inheritance was something he both guarded and gently parodied.

Late Career and Autobiography
By the late 1980s and 1990s, his byline conferred an expectation of fearless, entertaining contrarianism. He continued to publish collections drawn from his diaries and essays, and in midlife he produced an autobiography, Will This Do?, a title that suggested his practiced insouciance. The book mixed reminiscence with set pieces about Fleet Street, schooldays, and the long shadow cast by Evelyn Waugh. He never entirely escaped comparison with his father, but by then he did not need to: he had created, through thousands of columns, a distinct, resilient voice.

Illness and Death
Recurring health problems shadowed his later years, a legacy in part of his youthful accident and in part of the ordinary attrition of a hard-working life in newspapers. Nevertheless he wrote to the end with clarity and mischief. Auberon Waugh died in 2001, in Somerset, aged in his early sixties. He was survived by Teresa and their children, and his passing prompted affectionate obituaries from colleagues and rivals who recognized that the British press had lost one of its most idiosyncratic craftsmen.

Legacy
Auberon Waugh's legacy rests on his accomplishment as a columnist, editor, and satirist who gave principled opposition a distinctive music. He upheld the rights of readers to good prose and of writers to be amusing, cantankerous, and exacting. The Bad Sex in Fiction Award continues to outlive its founder, as does the tradition of the Spectator diary to which he gave such brio. Within the family he represented continuity: a bridge between Evelyn Waugh's mid-century eminence and the later careers of Alexander and Daisy. In British letters he stands as a reminder that wit can be a form of moral seriousness, and that a columnist's weekly skirmishes, sustained over decades, amount to a body of work.

Our collection contains 3 quotes who is written by Auberon, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners.

Other people realated to Auberon: Jeffrey Bernard (Journalist)

• 1975 Come, Shadow, Come (Novel)
• 1972 A Bed of Flowers (Novel)
• 1971 Who Are the Violets Now? (Novel)
• 1968 Consider the Lilies (Novel)
• 1960 The Foxglove Saga (Novel)

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