A book for these days …

… Watching the World from Hetton | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Read today, A Handful of Dust may lack some of the obvious pleasures of other major works by Waugh. It has neither the acidic humor of Scoop (1938) nor the resplendent solemnity of Brideshead Revisited (1945). But at its center is a character whose condition, if not his circumstances, mirrors our own: the quintessential upper-class Englishman, Tony Last, who with his wife Brenda and young son John Andrew, leads a life in retreat from a hostile, declining society.