William Leith15 August 2013
Duncan Fallowell is a wonderfully bookish memoirist with an exquisite sense of place. He’s superb at capturing buildings, interiors and landscapes. He goes to Gozo, India, Scotland and Wales. In a remote part of Wales, he meets an old man in a bar who makes an interesting, and ambiguous, comment about Evelyn Waugh. This, he realises later, is Alastair Graham, the real-life model for Sebastian Flyte. My God! So Fallowell goes back and knocks on the old man’s door. He is rebuffed. But he pieces together Graham’s life wonderfully well; reading this, we get a good picture of Waugh, too.
