If there is a literary gene, then the Waugh family has it. The first literary Waugh was Arthur, who, having won a poetry prize in 1888, broke with the family tradition of medicine. He went on to become a distinguished publisher and an influential book columnist. He fathered two sons, Alec and Evelyn, both of whom were to become novelists of note; were to rebel in their own ways against his bedrock Victorianism; and one of whom, Evelyn, was to write a series of immortal novels that will be prized as long as elegance and lethal wit are admired. Evelyn begat, among others, Auberon, who would carry on in the family tradition of literary skill and eccentricity, becoming one of England's most incorrigibly cantankerous and provocative newspaper columnists. And Auberon begat Alexander, yet another writer, to whom it has fallen to tell this tale of four generations of scribbling Waughs.--From publisher description.