Waugh came up.

hugh bonneville downton abbey nov 2011

Evelyn Waugh, er, Hugh Bonneville. Dammit, will someone please let me make this movie?

“I know I’m not a wordsmith,” Bushnell said, the afternoon sun shining on her face through a wall of glass doors. “And I don’t write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it’s really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels. I think when I was 12, I started reading Evelyn Waugh, and I loved Evelyn Waugh so much, and I thought: This is how the world really is. If I could be Evelyn Waugh, then I would be happy.’ ”

– from Edith Zimmerman’s “Candace Bushnell’s Fantasy World, Starring Candace Bushnell” in The New York Times Magazine

Waugh’s masterpiece, “A Handful of Dust,” is one of the finest English novels of the last century, both hilarious and catastrophically sad. And it contains a climactic scene that I just don’t buy at all, a scene I detest, a horrible scene that bowls me over with the beauty and skill of its telling every time.

– from Maria Bustillos’s “Reading Writers I Can’t Stand” on The New Yorker’s website.

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