Waugh in Abyssinia

Waugh in Abyssinia - Cover

by Evelyn Waugh

introduction by John Maxwell Hamilton

From Our Own Correspondent

288 pages / 5.25 x 8.00 inches / 1 map

Language Arts / Journalism | Performing Arts / Media Studies

Paperback / 9780807132517 / May 2007

Scoop is the closest thing foreign correspondents have to a bible. They swear by—and along with generations of general readers laugh at—the zany antics of reporters in fictional Ishmaelia. Few readers, however, are acquainted with Waugh's memoir of his stint as a London Daily Mail correspondent in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) during the Italian invasion in the 1930s. An entertaining account by a cantankerous and unenthusiastic war reporter, Waugh in Abyssinia provides a fascinating short history of Mussolini's imperial adventure as well as a wickedly witty preview of the characters and follies that figure into Waugh's famous satire.

In a new foreword, veteran foreign correspondent John Maxwell Hamilton explores how Waugh ended up in Abyssinia, which real-life events were fictionalized in Scoop, and how this memoir fits into Waugh's overall literary career, which includes the classic Brideshead Revisited. As Hamilton explains, Waugh was the right man (a misfit), in the right place (a largely unknown country that lent itself to farcical imagination), at the right time (when the correspondents themselves were more interesting than the scraps of news they could get.) The result, Waugh in Abyssinia, is a memoir like no other. 

John Maxwell Hamilton, a former journalist and government official, is the Hopkins P. Breazeale LSU Foundation Professor of Journalism in the Manship School of Mass Communication at LSU and a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. He has authored or edited many books, including Journalism’s Roving Eye and Manipulating the Masses, both of which won the Goldsmith Book Prize.

Found an Error? Tell us about it.

×