Tony Last, who is sort of the hero of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, is a landed Englishman, barely managing to maintain his ancestral estate in the 1930s. His ancestral home, we are informed, has been defaced in hideous Victorian Gothic style, but he loves it. He also loves his wife Brenda and his little son John.

Over the course of this book he will lose all three of those, in various ways, and will be last seen on a feckless exploratory expedition, in search of a lost city, in the Amazon region of South America.

A Handful of Dust has a high reputation as a satirical novel. I found it a very wry book, but funny only in a mordant way. The humor is subtle (much went over my head, I’m certain) and exceedingly dark.

Perhaps later history was too much in my mind as I read. This book was written before World War II, before the British Empire dissolved, and before the Anglosphere fell into the hands of people committed to its erasure. Tony Last, the hero of A Handful of Dust, is an idealist and a romantic, which is his tragedy.

It is also the tragedy of everyone who ever loved England, if only from afar.