Though relatively unknown in this country, Auberon Waugh has enjoyed a long and prolific career as one of England’s most consistently opinionated, confrontational, and bumptious journalists. Since 1986, Waugh has been editor of the Literary Review, and he has also acted as political columnist on The Spectator, The New Statesman, The Daily Mail, and, less reputably, on the Murdoch tabloid publications News of the World and Sun. His most notable contributions to political journalism have been his “Diaries” in Private Eye, which appeared regularly in that satire sheet from 1972 to 1986. In Private Eye Waugh was given editorial license to be scathing and scatological, not only to his natural enemies on the Left but even to his allies on the Right—a license Waugh enjoyed to the full, finding that he had almost exhausted the possibilities of venom in the process: “the great problem,” he writes, “was always to find enough people I wished to be rude about.”

In recent years his work has begun to appear in a few American publications such as Vanity Fair and Harper’s, but there is no denying that Waugh’s brand of satire does not travel well. He has said that Will This Do?, his recent autobiography, has so far failed to find an American publisher purely because of its provocatively un-PC attitudes, but a more likely reason is that, among New York book editors, his work is thought “too British” for U.S. consumption: