Most acclaimed
Troubled Loyalty
As a prosy parti pris biography, this book succeeds in convincing you that Adam von Trott zu Solz, the Hessian aristocrat hanged after the 1944 conspiracy against Hitler, was never a Nazi sympathizer, much less the Nazi agent Sykes says some still think him. As a period study, it is absorbing--partly because of Trott's ""good Prussian""-neo-Hegelian-Oxonian background, and partly because Trott cultivated an acquaintance which embraced the Cliveden Circle and Stafford Cripps, German socialists and the Foreign Policy Association, as well as the anti-Hitler Kreisau Circle. Sykes draws heavily on primary sources including memoirs and letters. As a study of Trott's inchoate but significant political views, the book is superficial. The ""conservative revolutionary"" tag remains a tag. The presentation of Trott as a tragic figure is marred by an impression that he might have spent more more time really trying to overthrow Hitler and less on his diplomatic pitch for better Allied terms toward a post-Hitler Germany. Having stressed the devout patriotism which partly explains the weakness of the opposition, Sykes further admits that Trott, like many other anti-Nazis, shared the Third Reich's imperial aims. Yet Sykes shows that there was more to Trott; and though its faults are severe (another being a total lack of interpretation of Nazism itself) and its readership specialized, this is a suggestive book.
Evelyn Waugh
One of the foremost writers of our time, Evelyn Waugh was also one of its most extraordinary eccentrics, with a life full of comedy and conflict. Selina Hastings, who was granted unrestricted access to his personal papers by Waugh's family, has uncovered a wealth of new material in her eight years of research for this volume. Letters, diaries, and family photographs shed new light on Waugh's childhood, his affairs at Oxford, his ill-fated first marriage and subsequent romantic adventures, his World War II military service, and his enduring but thorny friendships with such notable figures as Diana Cooper, Ann Fleming, and Nancy Mitford. Perceptive, fascinating, by turns hilarious and tragic, Hastings' portrait gives us Waugh's glittering social life at Oxford, where he was a friend of Harold Acton, Cyril Connolly, Anthony Powell, and Alastair Graham, the inspiration for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. Waugh then followed a diverse career as schoolmaster, world traveler, war correspondent, and, as a novelist, one of the brightest lights of Britain's fashionable society. Here in intimate detail are the collapse of Waugh's first marriage and his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church, his second marriage and ambivalence about family life, and the social milieu satirized in such classics as Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, and A Handful of Dust. Here is Evelyn Waugh in all his extremes, brought brilliantly to life in a thoroughly entertaining biography.