These lines follow her process of realisation: When John Andrew’s mother, Brenda, is first told of her son’s death she mistakenly believes that it is her lover who has come to grief. Īnd what if John Andrew had not been killed? Then literature would have been robbed of some of its most infamous lines of dialogue. Just don’t get on Thunderclap, John Andrew (even the boy’s pony is named after a steed which killed to riders before mortally wounding itself on a hunt). And as for poor John Andrew, Tony’s son: well, we counted at least four hints in the text that his first hunting trip (‘I hope he won’t break his neck’…’Are you sure it’s safe’… ‘ You won’t see any death’… ‘The world might come to an end…’) would also be his only one. The indigenous people employed as his escort disappear in the night, and his rescuer-turned captor’s name is the German for death. Italy scoreline, Tony’s eventual fate is subject to rather more foreshadowing.

While on Saturday morning we were, as yet, blissfully unaware of the final England V. Tony then embarks on an uncharacteristic expedition to the Amazonian rainforest, where he catches fever and taken in by the sinister Mr Todd who, as we soon learn, is reluctant to let him go. When the Lasts’ six-year-old son John Andrew is killed on the way back from hunting, Brenda leaves Tony for John. The basic storyline is this: Tony and Brenda Last are happy enough, on the surface at least, until Brenda falls for the worthless social hanger-on and sponger John Beaver. This 1934 novel marks a real shift in Waugh’s work and the latent darkness of Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies bubbles up to the service in adultery, child death and a nightmare fate for the lead character that sees Tony Last incarcerated in a remote corner of Brazil reading Charles Dickens to his captor for, we must assume, the rest of his days.

A Handful of Dust started life as the illustrated short story ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’, which appeared in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine in November 1933

Book a handful of dust