Vile Bodies — Evelyn Waugh

Description

Evelyn Waugh's 1930 satire of England's "Bright Young Things" — a whirl of decadent parties, gossip columns, motor races, and moral drift among London's fashionable young set, hurtling with sharp comic bite toward the shadow of a coming war.

This is a U.S. public-domain edition (entered the public domain in the United States in 2026, 95 years after first publication). It may still be under copyright in other countries.

Excerpt

It was clearly going to be a bad crossing.

With Asiatic resignation Father Rothschild S.J. put down his suitcase in the corner of the bar and went on deck. (It was a small suitcase of imitation crocodile hide. The initials stamped on it in Gothic characters were not Father Rothschild's, for he had borrowed it that morning from the valet-de-chambre of his hotel. It contained some rudimentary underclothes, six important new books in six languages, a false beard and a school atlas and gazetteer heavily annotated.) Standing on the deck Father Rothschild leant his elbows on the rail, rested his chin in his hands and surveyed the procession of passengers coming up the gangway, each face eloquent of polite misgiving.