Penguin Modern Classics

Composed between 1939-62, the late stories of Evelyn Waugh are in turn blackly comic and bitingly satirical. In ''The Sympathetic Passenger'' a radio-loathing retiree picks up exactly the wrong hitchhiker, while ''Charles Ryder''s Schooldays'' provides a hilarious and fragmentary insight into life before Brideshead. These witty and immaculately crafted stories display the finest writing of a master of satire and comic twists.