Everyone knows how funny Evelyn Waugh is. One of his finest comic creations was his own increasingly rebarbative public persona - a self-confessed 'front of pomposity mitigated by indiscretion, that was as hard, bright and antiquated as a cuirass'. No wonder new biographies of Waugh are popular. The life and work cannot be separated. Gathered productively at the writer's desk are the chaotic and often bizarre details of Waugh's own life, what he called...