- He allegedly declined the C.B.E. (Commander of the order of the British Empire) in 1959.
- He was a grandfather of 10.
- He was the son of Arthur Waugh.
- He was the father of Maria Teresa (b. 1938), Auberon Waugh (1939-2001), Mary (1940-1940), Margaret Evelyn (1942-1986), Harriet Mary (b. 1944), James (b. 1946) and Michael Septimus (b. 1950).
- He based his character, Rex Mottram, on Brendan Bracken.
- The Granada Television adaptation of his novel Brideshead Revisited (1981) was one of the landmark television series of the 1980s.
- He was a satirical British novelist and a convert to Roman Catholicism. He also wrote travel books and biographies. Waugh was an alcoholic and a depressive. His "The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold" (1957) was a revelation about his unhappiness, while "The Loved One" was a satire on the American undertaker's industry. He is best remembered for "Brideshead Revisited" (1945).
- His novel "The Loved One" was a big influence on Eric Saward's script for Revelation of the Daleks: Part One (1985).
- Graduated from Lancing College in West Sussex, England.
- He was a chain-smoker of big cigars and drank at least one bottle of wine with meals per day, as well as spirits. He took very little exercise. His doctors often warned him about his life-style, but he ignored them. On Easter Sunday, 1966, he returned home from church with his family and excused himself to visit the lavatory. Whilst there, he suffered an instantaneously fatal heart attack. His friend Graham Greene later wryly remarked that the circumstances of his death combined the spiritual and comic aspects of his writing - the spirituality indicated by its date, and the comedy by its location.
- He had a strong dislike of Sir Winston Churchill, whom he once contemptuously described as "a radio personality who outlived his time". When Churchill died in January of 1965, Waugh received several lucrative offers from American magazines to write obituary pieces about him; he refused all of them.
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