The Queen's Reading Room

Scoop

By Evelyn Waugh

Recommended By William Boyd

I believe Evelyn Waugh’s comic novels are his greatest achievements and Scoop is pre-eminent amongst the four or five classic comedies he wrote. Scoop is an almost perfect comic novel set in the world of 1930s journalism, very funny, wickedly accurate and beautifully, economically written.
~ William Boyd

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Publish Date: 1938

Lord Copper, newspaper magnate and proprietor of ‘The Daily Beast’, is convinced that he has found the perfect young reporter to cover the crisis in the African Republic of Ishmaelia. William Boot, a nature contributor to the newspaper, finds himself mistaken for his remote cousin and popular novelist and sent to East Africa to report on the war. In this comedy of mistaken identities, Waugh explores the frenzied pursuit of a good scoop at all costs.

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