“The true spirit of England has always been incurably flippant,” wrote Auberon Waugh in January 1992 in “From the Pulpit,” his monthly foreword to Literary Review, the magazine he edited from 1986 until his death in January 2001. No one better embodied that flippant spirit than Waugh, known to his many friends as Bron. Blessed with a playfully ferocious sense of mischief, colored with an irrepressible element of fantasy and a deft and elegant pen, reminiscent of his father, Evelyn Waugh, Bron was the most entertaining journalist of recent times, incapable of writing a dull sentence. He could be vicious not only to deserving targets like Edward “Grocer” Heath and the disgraced Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, but also to his father’s friend Anthony Powell, or to Lord Gowrie, who he said had stolen his girlfriend at Oxford.

There was a contrast in him between his sharp pen and the kindly, generous man he was. “He was a nice little boy,” Peter Hutton, a Somerset neighbor, said of the child “Bronny,” and throughout his life people found Bron agreeable, often to their surprise. Evelyn Waugh once lamented that everyone except himself appeared to find it so easy to be nice. Waugh the younger appears to have found the solution by being teasingly aggressive in his published writings and being nice off the page. Of course, goody-goodies failed to see his charm. Polly Toynbee, whom Waugh described as “the bbc’s dreaded” social affairs editor, lambasted him immediately after his