Alexander Waugh – författare

This volume is part of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh critical edition, which brings together all Waugh's published and previously unpublished writings for the first time with comprehensive introductions and annotation. The edition's General Editor is Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh's grandson and editor of the twelve-volume Personal Writings sequence, which collates all Waugh's letters, diaries, and other personal writings in chronological order.Volume one of the series covers the years 1903-1921, ending with Waugh's departure from Lancing College, aged 18, with a scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford. For many years at Lancing Waugh kept a daily account of his life, and every diary entry is reprinted here along with the lively pen-and ink drawings that accompanied them and the letters he sent to his parents and friends. No other book presents such a rich anthology of writing by a school-boy, let alone one who would later turn into a major literary figure and novelist of genius.

The Wittgenstein family was one of the richest, most talented and most eccentric in European history. The domineering paternal influence of Karl Wittgenstein left his eight children fraught by inner antagonisms and nervous tension. Three of his sons committed suicide; Paul, the fourth, became a world-famous concert pianist (using only his left hand), while Ludwig, the youngest, is now regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. In this dramatic historical and psychological epic, Alexander Waugh traces the triumphs and vicissitudes of a family held together by a fanatical love of music yet torn apart by money, madness, conflicts of loyalty and the cataclysmic upheaval of two world wars.