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The real-life inspiration for many of the characters in Waugh's World War II trilogy is not hard to detect. Sometimes Waugh gives them names and habits which make the identification transparent; sometimes they can be identified from our knowledge of Waugh's biography and prejudices. "Old Ruby," who lives in the Dorchester Hotel and gives dinner parties in honor of celebrities like Sir James Barrie (who, to her annoyance, fails to appear, having been dead for many years), is surely the famous society hostess, Emerald, Lady Cunard, also a denizen of the Dorchester during the war. Cyril Connolly, editor of Horizon, figures as Everard Spruce, editor of the avant-garde Survival , in the pages of which he publishes the writings of a survival from Waugh's earlier works-the poet Parsnip, who, in Put Out More Flags, has fled to America at the beginning of the war, along with his alliterative collaborator, Pimpernel! (Auden and Isherwood, of course). Parsnip's future fate is disclosed in Love Among the Ruins, both in the text and in a drawing by Waugh, where he is shown as an unhappy, desiccated old figure, waiting patiently for admission at the entrance to the voluntary euthanasia chamber kindly provided by the authorities of the British Utopia. Auden 's sympathetic treatment of Waugh in his New Yorker review of A Little Learning is a remarkable feat of Christian forgiveness, if that is what it was"! The ubiguitous Mrs. Stitch, also a survival from earlier Waugh, who takes charge of Guy Crouchback on his return from Crete to Alexandria, where her husband is an important emissary of the British government, has long been identified with Lady Diana Cooper, whose husband, Duff Cooper (later Viscount Norwich), held such an office at this time. The commando officer, Brigadier...