Auberon Waugh

Auberon Waugh (17 November 1939 – 16 January 2001) was an English journalist and author who was the son of Evelyn Waugh.

Auberon Waugh in the 1980s

Quotes

• Politics, as I never tire of saying, is for social and emotional misfits, handicapped folk, those with a grudge. The purpose of politics is to help them overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power.
  • "The Power Urge," essay in The Spectator (15 December, 1982); reprinted in Another Voice (1986), p. 92

• Of the two crises facing us this Christmas — the caviare crisis and the Gulf crisis — I must admit finding the caviare crisis the more immediate. Many people — including children — are actually having to do without any caviare at all this Christmas.
  • "Way of the World", The Daily Telegraph (24 December 1990), p. 23

• I don't want 'constructive criticism'. I want praise.
  • Cited in The Times Literary Supplement (6 March 2009)

About Waugh

• He wrote to no agenda or party line. He did not believe it was the job of journalists to run the country or to advise politicians, but to nip at the heels of sacred cows and expose the inadequacy of the emperor's new clothes. He never pontificated about family values but he lived them, deeply. And however cruelly he wrote on occasions, he was unfailingly kind in real life. He believed that it was our duty to be happy as long as possible because tomorrow we die.
  • Lynn Barber "Waugh stories", The Observer (21 January 2001)
  • The original print article appeared in The Observer, rather than The Guardian; on this occasion, the online source does not distinguish between the two publications.

• With allies in the class struggle like Auberon Waugh the middle class has no need of enemies. Last night ATV transmitted the third and last programme in his series This is Waugh, in which he pleads for his right to go on living in the large and comfortable country house his father left him in Somerset, while the workers go on doing their own thing somewhere as far away as possible.
• It has been heartbreaking to see a legitimate and important cause—the survival of the middle class ethic—defended three weeks running by a procession of utterly unsympathetic nutters.
  • Max Hastings "This heartbreaking Waugh", Evening Standard (24 August 1976), p. 13