Most Americans know of the British novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966)—if they know him at all—from the television series based on his Brideshead Revisited, a country house fantasy which held public television viewers in the United States in deep thrall for weeks on end two decades ago. Although Waugh intended Brideshead to be a deeply serious novel with a religious theme, its film version resembled nothing so much as an opulent advertisement for the British Tourist Authority. Indeed, if the Brideshead series were all one knew of Waugh, one would never suspect that he was one of the least provincial of English writers. In fact, much of his work deals with the point at which European civilization and colonial or semi-colonial societies met head on—usually to their mutual incomprehension.

From early manhood Waugh was a tireless traveler, often to countries where the weather, both physical and political, was inhospitable. During the early 1930s he visited Egypt and Somalia on the way to Ethiopia to cover the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie for a London newspaper. On other journeys he visited Aden, Zanzibar, Uganda, and what was then the Belgian Congo. Even as a middle-aged man, overweight, increasingly deaf, and no longer capable of enduring discomfort for long periods of time, he visited Israel and Jordan, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and British Guiana. In one way or another, every one of these trips was recycled into literature, both conventional travel books and extremely memorable novels. Of the latter, the best of