brilliant - Rated 
what a fantastic book. It is a rarety when i find a book that i don't want to end because it's so good. This is one of them. A lovely gem which has started me on the path of more Waugh books. A great insight into the 1920's which is my favourite era.
Vile People? - Rated
This novel is set between the wars when the age of the Toff was coming to an end. Evelyn Waugh wrote about the IT generation of his age, which he was a member of with dazzling acerbity. This is a virtuosic masterpiece written by our greatest satirist on a subject that he knew only too well. The 'Bright Young Things' as they were populary known as, or vile bodies as Waugh calls them were the type of people who when older would populate government and senior positions of power. It is ultimatley for the reader to make up his mind about the characters, but there is a bit of us that wishes we could get away with some of their shenanigans. This is without doubt a highly funny and very satisfying read, that you will want to come back to again and again.
How terribly sick-making, dahling! - Rated 
The best part of this book is the end. Read the last four pages and you get a real sense of (high) society breaking down as war breaks out. The rest of the book is not so much badly written as badly dated; satire does not date well, look at old copies of Punch magazine or the works of PG Wodehouse and it is obvious that they should have been pulped once 1950 was over. "Vile Bodies" is a particularly irritating example of the genre: ridiculously over the top character names, bon mots aplenty (mostly pretty poor puns) and any sembelence of a plot lost in a haze of SATIRE. Imagine listening to Noel Coward records for four hours straight and you have an idea of what reading this boook feels like.
Definitely not one of Waugh's best works - Rated 
I chose this book for my reading group as I am a great fan of Waugh (this is the sixth book of his that I have read). What a mistake! I should have listened to my son (another keen fan) who warned me that this is one of his most difficult and, it has to be said, boring books, and that it would not endear Waugh to new readers. He was spot on. I read it with mounting disappointment - and found it an excellent cure for insomnia (on four consecutive nights I didn't get further than the same page). However I dutifully read it to the end and can't say I laughed once. Worse, though, is that the other members in my book group also found it deadly dull and most of them couldn't get through it, short though it is.
If you are new to Waugh don't start here! Read Decline and Fall first (Waugh's first novel) or Scoop which is really funny, or The Loved One, a delicious satire on the American funeral industry (and the first Waugh book I read, that made me want to read more).
This book to me is an interesting period piece, and does say something about the inter-war era, and even has parallels with today's cult of celebrity, but it is rather unfunny, and lacks the style and wit of Waugh's other works.
If you want to know what it's about without suffering the boredom of reading it, get the DVD of Stephen Fry's film version, "Bright Young Things", which manages to inject interest and fun into the story. I shall be arranging a showing of that to my fellow book club members so that they won't feel the book was a wasted exercise. Incidentally this must be one of the few instances where the film is actually better than the book!
vile, awful people - Rated
i was for a long time reticent about reading this chaps work, just thinking it was a posh bloke writing about posh people falling in love and getting divorced. how 19% wrong i was. after enjoying this book very much, the only thing which stuck me was that i found myself asking what the title was about? i hoped that it meant that the people in the novel are vile people, gossiping, supercilious, snobbish, selfish, low-marks. what else could it mean? this book is very funny, especially the colonel blount, and the language of the young people. it sums up any age really. because at heart, human nature really is vile. i dont think evelyn rated the book very highly thinking it turned a little too bitter for his liking, but i disagree with the little scamp. i give it high marks!
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