During a sixty-year career Alec Waugh wrote twenty-nine novels and an almost equal number of books of other kinds, including travel books, short-story collections, and autobiographies. The settings for his novels, drawn from his experiences as a sportsman, soldier, gourmet, lover, world traveler, intelligence officer, and lecturer, cover the globe from England to France, the Middle East, the Far East, the Caribbean, and the United States.

Alexander Raban Waugh was born in Hampstead on 8 July 1898 to Arthur and Catherine Charlotte Raban Waugh. An Oxford graduate, Arthur Waugh had left his rural north Somerset home at twenty-three to try freelance writing in London; there, assisted by a distant cousin, Edmund Gosse, he had met the London literati and had become recognized as an important critic. Alec's brother, Evelyn, who would become a more important writer than Alec, was born in 1903. The following year Arthur Waugh became the managing director...