The year 1973 saw a big serialisation of the private diaries of Evelyn Waugh in the Observer Magazine, edited by Michael Davie. The edition of 1 April covered the period between ‘coming down from Oxford and getting secretly engaged in the winter of 1927’, which was ‘probably the unhappiest stretch of his life’ (‘Waugh on the bright young people’).
‘Oxford had introduced him to a new world of smart and clever people, but it was borne in on him, after he came down, that he was not really part of that world,’ wrote Davie. Furthermore, Waugh himself never really liked parties, which was rather the whole point of the Bright Young People.
