“Looking back over my career to date, and at all the people I have insulted, I am mildly surprised that I am still allowed to exist”, wrote Auberon Waugh in 1980. For the remaining twenty-one years of his life he took pleasure in adding to his list of victims. Feminism and AIDS were bracketed together as “plagues”, ramblers were “semi-uniformed thugs”, the “lower classes” appeared “ugly, boring, humourless and desperately conceited”, and the female delegates at a Labour Party conference struck him as “either hunch-backed or hairy-legged or obviously lesbian”. It’s natural to associate such views with an age now pretty remote. But Waugh was born in the same year as John Cleese and Margaret Drabble; he was younger than Jilly Cooper and Vanessa Redgrave, John Prescott and David Dimbleby. Were he still alive, he would not yet be eighty.
