Having just read Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, I’m reminded of what excellent writing can be – not only vivid and humorous, but more importantly, deeply cutting.

My wife knew what was wanted. She had neat, hygienic ways for that too, but there were both relief and triumph in her smile of welcome; later we parted and lay in twin beds a yard or two distant, smoking.

I was a free man; she had given me my manumission in that brief, sly lapse of hers; my cuckold’s horns made me lord of the forest.

I can understand a man wishing he hadn’t married and trying to get out of it but to get rid of one wife and take up with another immediately is beyond reason.

Finally, while not his words but his actions, it is interesting to note that Waugh, a failed writer at the start, attempted suicide, leaving his clothes and a note on the shore, only to retreat from the sea when he was stung by a jellyfish.