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WAUGH (EVELYN) Sword of Honour, AUTHOR'S PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED "For Patrick [Balfour], with congratulations on his escape from incineration from Evelyn" on front free endpaper, Chapman and Hall, 1965 image 1
WAUGH (EVELYN) Sword of Honour, AUTHOR'S PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED "For Patrick [Balfour], with congratulations on his escape from incineration from Evelyn" on front free endpaper, Chapman and Hall, 1965 image 2
Lot 213

WAUGH (EVELYN)
Sword of Honour, AUTHOR'S PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED "For Patrick [Balfour], with congratulations on his escape from incineration from Evelyn" on front free endpaper, Chapman and Hall, 1965

27 November 2018, 13:00 GMT
London, Knightsbridge

Sold for £1,500 inc. premium

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WAUGH (EVELYN)

Sword of Honour, AUTHOR'S PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED "For Patrick [Balfour], with congratulations on his escape from incineration from Evelyn" on front free endpaper, ink correction ("nuts" to "nut") on p.262 possibly in Waugh's hand, publisher's blue cloth, dust-jacket, 8vo, Chapman and Hall, 1965

Footnotes

PRESENTATION COPY OF SWORD OF HONOUR, INSCRIBED TO PATRICK BALFOUR, MODEL FOR THE CHARACTER LORD KILBANNOCK.

Sword of Honour "now stands as as single great novel, no longer a trilogy, and the final monument to his many gifts - those of the exact historian (military, social, religious), the superb recorder of swift action, the creator of larger-than-life comic characters, the Augustan stylist" (Anthony Burgess, article in Spectator, 15 April 1966), an opinion seconded by Christopher Sykes who wrote that "the whole trilogy is not surpassed by any other book he wrote".

Provenance: Patrick Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross (1904-1976). Mark Amory, editor of The Letters of Evelyn Waugh suggests that Waugh drew on his friend Balfour for the character of Lord Kilbannock in the Sword trilogy. Like Kilbannock, Balfour had been a journalist, and was also of course a Lord. The cryptic meaning of Waugh's inscription presumably relates to a large fire (in 1965) that caused great damage to Balfour's home at Warwick Avenue, London, but perhaps also references the word "Immolatus" used in the heading of chapter five of the novel.

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