Inside story …

… The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh Vol 30: Personal Writings 1903-1921: Precocious Waughs by Alexander Waugh and Alan Bell - review | London Evening Standard. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Re-reading these diaries to write A Little Learning, Waugh wrote, but did not publish, this paragraph, now included in the notes of the new edition and quoted by Alexander Waugh in his introduction: “If what I wrote was a true account of myself, I was [cold-hearted, supercilious arrogant and callous] conceited, heartless & cautiously malevolent. I should like to believe that even in this private journal I was [showing off] dissembling a more generous nature; that I absurdly thought cynicism and cruelty the marks of maturity. I pray it may be so. But the evidence is there, in sentence after sentence, on page after page, of consistent caddishness.”