Virtuoso of the Vituperative

William Cook, Kiss Me, Chudleigh: The World According to Auberon Waugh (Coronet/Hachette, 2011), 384 pages, $49.99. 

Asked abruptly (as in a quiz) for the names of two journalists writing in my lifetime whom I most esteemed, I would instantly answer: George Orwell and Auberon Waugh. They might seem an odd pair to choose, and they were barely even contemporaries. (Orwell was born in 1903; when he died in 1950, Waugh had not yet entered his teens.)

Their lives and their literary styles could hardly have differed more: Orwell resolutely left-wing, style rather serious but with a transparent clarity and honesty that lent joy to reading. Waugh’s words sparkled with wit and paradox, irreverence and frivolity. Pompous readers he infuriated, whether from the Right or from the Left, but his outrageous insights were as shrewd and as biting as Orwell’s.

It was odd that both authors (far apart in time and space) had once almost died of bullet wounds. George had been shot through the throat by…