Auberon Waugh (Auberon Alexander Waugh) Biography

British journalist, critic, and novelist, born in Somerset, the eldest son of Evelyn Waugh, educated at Downside School and Oxford University. His lasting antagonism towards the British public school system is expressed in his amusing first novel, The Foxglove Saga (1960). He wrote three further satirical novels, Path of Dalliance (1963), about Oxford in the 1950s; Who Are the Violets Now? (1965), about Fleet Street; and Consider the Lilies (1968), his best and funniest novel, about an agnostic rural clergyman with a difficult wife. His career as a journalist began in 1960 with the Daily Telegraph, after which he joined the Mirror Group as a ‘special writer’. In 1967 he became political correspondent of the Spectator, he was dismissed from this post in 1970 by the editor, Nigel Lawson, and won an action for wrongful dismissal. Since then he has worked variously as columnist, reviewer, and polemicist on several journals and newspapers including The Times, Private Eye, the New Statesman, the Evening Standard, and the Independent. In 1986 he became editor of the Literary Review.