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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Evelyn Waugh chose the name "Labels" for his first travel book because, he said, the places he visited were already "fully labelled" in people's minds. Yet even the most seasoned traveller could not fail to be inspired by his quintessentially English attitude and by his eloquent and frequently outrageous wit. From Europe to the Middle East and North Africa, from Egyptian porters and Italian priests to Maltese sailors and Moroccan merchants - as he cruises around the Mediterranean his pen cuts through the local colour to give an entertaining portrait of the Englishman abroad.
About the Author
Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903 and was educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). In 1945 he published Brideshead Revisited and he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1952 for Men at Arms. Evelyn Waugh died in 1966.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
What a great book. Evelyn Waugh is more famous for books like Brideshead Revisited and A Handful of Dust, both of which are fairly tragic. He also wrote satirical, dark comedies like Scoop and The Loved One. This is a non-fiction book in which he attempts the travel genre, with in my view, stunning success. He ambles about using a cruise ship to transport him wherever his whims take him, commenting upon some of the usual sights you would expect, but also taking in local peculiarities, and more importantly people watching.
He has a wonderful turn of phrase and a delightfully irreverent approach to his commentary, he often addresses the reader directly, which makes for a much more conversational, intimate journey for the reader. He takes in the delights of France,Greece, Italy, Egypt and Algeria to name but a few. His dialogue about discovering the works of Gaudi in Barcelona is particularly charming and enthusiastic and his juxtaposition of the serious and silly works beautifully.
This is a book of its time, and in this way reminded me very much of the travel books of Lawrence Durrell which I also loved. It is worth reading, not because you will ever be able to retrace his steps, but precisely because you won't, and you are able to enter into a unique series of snapshots of a bygone era. Delightful.
He has a wonderful turn of phrase and a delightfully irreverent approach to his commentary, he often addresses the reader directly, which makes for a much more conversational, intimate journey for the reader. He takes in the delights of France,Greece, Italy, Egypt and Algeria to name but a few. His dialogue about discovering the works of Gaudi in Barcelona is particularly charming and enthusiastic and his juxtaposition of the serious and silly works beautifully.
This is a book of its time, and in this way reminded me very much of the travel books of Lawrence Durrell which I also loved. It is worth reading, not because you will ever be able to retrace his steps, but precisely because you won't, and you are able to enter into a unique series of snapshots of a bygone era. Delightful.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Like all Waugh's prose this book is entertaining and elegant, with effortless one-liners peppering the text. It is not a great book, and not Waugh's best. But if the aim of a travel book is to stimulate interest in the places the author has visited, then this book does succeed in that. Obviously all the people he wrote about are long dead and the world he describes is gone too. Nevertheless, it does stimulate the appetite for travel and gives a different slant as Waugh seemed to be more interested in the people he saw and met than the famous sites.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
Great and true wit..
28 Aug 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This delightful book describes an extended tour around the mainly Mediterranean Europe of the inter-World War years - it is in fact describing Waugh's own heavily disguised honeymoon. The resulting book gained much praise and interest...
"the new book that interests me most this week is Labels ... less for any outstanding merits it may possess than from the fact that I wrote it myself" as the author himself wrote in review!
Full of that marvelous inherited family wit, the book contains several favorite sentences, often quoted or at least partly remembered by fans of this family's writing. A gushing encounter at a tony cocktail party:
"..I love your books so much I never travel without them.. I keep them in a row by my bed."
"..by any chance you are not confusing me with my brother, Alec? He has written many more books than I.'
"Yes, of course. What's your name then?"
"Evelyn."
"But... they said you wrote!"
"Well, yes I do a little. You see I couldn't get any other sort of job".
Evelyn adds ruefully that he wondered if she would add Labels to the row by her bed.
Another gem, perhaps the most famous paragraph written in the entire genre of travel...
"I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset; the mountains almost invisible in a blur of pastel grey, glowing on the top ... the whole horizon behind radiant with pink light, fading gently into a grey pastel sky." Then the final sentence: "Nothing I have seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting."
A wonderful romping read.
"the new book that interests me most this week is Labels ... less for any outstanding merits it may possess than from the fact that I wrote it myself" as the author himself wrote in review!
Full of that marvelous inherited family wit, the book contains several favorite sentences, often quoted or at least partly remembered by fans of this family's writing. A gushing encounter at a tony cocktail party:
"..I love your books so much I never travel without them.. I keep them in a row by my bed."
"..by any chance you are not confusing me with my brother, Alec? He has written many more books than I.'
"Yes, of course. What's your name then?"
"Evelyn."
"But... they said you wrote!"
"Well, yes I do a little. You see I couldn't get any other sort of job".
Evelyn adds ruefully that he wondered if she would add Labels to the row by her bed.
Another gem, perhaps the most famous paragraph written in the entire genre of travel...
"I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset; the mountains almost invisible in a blur of pastel grey, glowing on the top ... the whole horizon behind radiant with pink light, fading gently into a grey pastel sky." Then the final sentence: "Nothing I have seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting."
A wonderful romping read.
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