Since I came up to Oxford only one year after Mr. Waugh went down, I have little to add to his description. Two of his friends, Mr. Harold Acton and Mr. Tom Driberg, were still up, and the latter introduced me to the poetry of T. S. Eliot. The lunch parties were still going on. The George Restaurant was still crowded. Panache and elegance were still much admired. Making friends was still of much greater importance than the academic studies we were ostensibly there to pursue. “It was a male community,” says Mr. Waugh. “Undergraduettes lived in purdah.” This was still the rule, but I knew of exceptions to it. There were three or four girls in my day who had somehow managed to get out and, like token Jews in a Wasp community, were accepted by us.

Mr Waugh is a thoughtful rather than an intimate autobiographer, in this volume. He keeps the lid on. His aim appears to be the desire to conform, no doubt ironically, to a carefully prepared conventional pattern and to repose, almost masochistically, upon a belief in the Unremarkable. Clearly this, in so dashing an imagination, suggests a conflict. His marvellous feel for the disreputable comes from a man with a family addiction to the neutral yet aspiring...

Cautious, lonely, observant at first at Oxford, Mr Waugh eventually kicked out, did the right thing by drinking a lot and coming down deep in debt, and was ready for a far more interesting life than appears in this opening volume. One must hope that his feeling for impersonality will not become so subtle as to make the irony too sober. The best things in the present volume are those that recover the detail of a period.

The Gibbonian classicism of A Little Learning is a great joy, but it is an act, a posture, and it derives from the father's more Dickensian histrionics as much as the fictional gift itself. It is no more a 'natural' style than the Elianism of Mr Waugh's father's bookish contemporaries, though it evokes an England of firmer tastes and more powerful convictions than were known to E. V. Lucas (whom Mr Waugh cites as his father's peer), Jack Squire, or W. W. Jacobs. The perfect mastery of the exact conceptual locution, often implying —as in Gibbon's own Autobiography—a. moral judgment that is not really there, is the source of all of Mr Waugh's humour and irony, as well as his carefully outmoded elegance...

The reader will be surprised at the lack of any literary passion in this first phase of Mr Waugh's development—no books set him on fire, Unless they are about the pre-Raphaelites. The young man who reads History and leaves Oxford with a bad third betrays no concern with scholarship. Mr Waugh, an ironic statue in a toga, practitioner of perfect prose, has always tended to frighten us as Gibbon or Johnson or Junius frightens us—with the hint of a formidable library, much of it in his brain. We need not be frightened any more, nor need we cringe, with an underdog whine, in the presence of the accents of aristocracy.