But for those who are not nodding, who have never heard of Scoop, who are wondering what all this is about, well, I envy you. For as Scoop virgins you have a pleasure ahead of you that you didn't know existed, and, in a world that grows flatter and duller as we age, that is a rare treat. Moreover, if you have not read Scoop you presumably have never heard of its author, Evelyn Waugh. So all of his works await you. Such bounty. Such riches.
Waugh was English. He was born in 1903 and died on the lavatory on Easter Sunday 63 years later. By then he was fat, deaf and bored, despite having a large country house and seven children (to the seventh of whom he gave the name Seventh in Latin).
He had numerous faults, by his own admission, from gluttony to sloth. He was a snob with a penchant for aristocratic Catholic families with huge inherited wealth. He became a Catholic himself aged thirty after his first marriage fell apart. His first wife was also called Evelyn.
The traditions of Catholicism were his refuge from the modern world. He despised everything that had happened in his lifetime which he summed up as "plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz".
On YouTube there are a couple of television interviews with him from late in his life but I'd advise against them. He says nothing revealing and in his thick tweed suit he comes across as supercilious, even smug. Ignore the artist. Read the art.
I read him first at university. A friend recommended Decline and Fall. I was enslaved by page three. "Please God," said the Junior Dean, "make them attack the chapel."
I went on to read everything he wrote, even the earnest religious stuff that he liked to pretend was his best work. In my third year at university I wrote a 4000 word dissertation on his work. It was less a critical analysis than a love letter. And that love has not diminished.
The universe of Waugh's books is an amoral Trumpian world of corruption, stupidity, greed and money. Into it he pitches an innocent anti-hero. The comedy lies in the contrast and the cruelty.
And then there's the prose itself. He handles the language with exquisite precision. Funny and beautiful is a rare combination. In Brideshead Revisited the narrator describes himself as "drowning in honey, stingless", which is just how it is to read Waugh at his best.
For the friend who emailed, who thought Scoop the greatest thing he had ever read, and who is grateful to the good lord for sparing him long enough to have come across it, I have news.
Scoop is perhaps only the third best of Waugh's comic novels. Wonder though it is it cannot match the faultless Decline and Fall, written when he was only 25.
Nor does it quite compare with The Loved One, Waugh's satire on all things American that remains as funny and as true today as when published in 1948 and which ends with the customary antihero waiting for the skull of… but no. I'll leave it to you and to him to find out.
And I seethe with envy at the thought. How I would love to be starting out on Waugh right now. To be opening Decline and Fall for the first time, and realising halfway down the first page that I was in thrall to a maestro and that I had all of his works ahead of me to discover: like levering aside a brick on some Egyptian tomb and shining a torch into the gloom beyond and seeing the first glint of gold.
