It is almost certain that Evelyn Waugh is the finest entertainer alive. It is certain that both Waugh and the kind of book he writes are supremely distasteful to many of the most serious people…. Waugh has been variously characterized as nasty, hateful, snobbish, trivial, reactionary, vindictive, fawning, immature, pompous, and rude, ascriptions which are substantially true yet somehow beside the point. The general repugnance of the contemporary intellectual for the literature of entertainment is, I think, related to his dislike of Waugh…. Our culture has to an unprecedented degree succeeded in dividing our entertainment from our elevation…. [We] are quick to mistrust any piece of writing which does not seem immediately to challenge profound assumptions or elicit the most delicate moral choices. Our less ponderous relations to literature have suffered an attrition, and it is possible that a certain kind of literature—the kind I assume Waugh...