When the Going Was Good

With the publication of When the Going Was Good Little, Brown takes great pleasure in returning to print a classic of travel journalism. Between 1928 and 1935 Evelyn Waugh wrote four travel books: Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days, and Waugh in Abyssinia, about journeys he made in Africa, South America, and the Middle East. In 1945 he excerpted five long pieces from these books and published them as When the Going Was Good, which became, in itself, a classic of the genre. The first piece takes us to Mediterranean ports-of-call -- Cairo, Port Said, Athens, Malta, Constantinople -- where, in 1929, Waugh went looking for (and found) "pleasure, luxurious and surprising; cookery, wine, eccentric individuals, grottoes by day, the haunts of the underworld at night." In the next two we find Waugh first in Abyssinia, reoprting in his inimitable style on the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie, and then travelling on to Kenya, Zanzibar, the Congo, and Capetown. In "A Journey to Brazil in 1932" Waugh explores the wilds of that country and British Guiana. In the last piece in the book, "A War in 1935," Waugh has returned to Abyssinia after the Italian invasion. Now a war correspondent,…

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More by Evelyn Waugh

More by Evelyn Waugh