Alexander Waugh, the writer, critic and journalist, who died 22 July, 2024, aged 60, was the son of Auberon Waugh and a grandson of the great Evelyn Waugh.
Alexander Evelyn Michael Waugh was born 30 December, 1963, the elder son of Auberon Alexander Waugh (1939-2001), and his wife the former Lady Teresa Lorraine Onslow (born 26 February, 1940), daughter of the 6th Earl of Onslow (1913-1971).
Among other books, he has written Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (2004), about five generations of his own family, and The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War (2008) about the Wittgenstein family. He is an advocate of the Oxfordian theory, which holds that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford was the real author of the works of William Shakespeare.
Alexander was the brother of Daisy Waugh and the grandson of Evelyn Waugh. He was educated at Taunton School, the University of Manchester and the University of Surrey, where he gained degrees in Music. Alexander Waugh was the chief opera critic of The Mail on Sunday (1990–1991) and of the Evening Standard (1991–1996). His books on music include Classical Music: A New Way of Listening (1995) and Opera: A New Way of Listening (1996).
Waugh's biography Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (2004), written at the suggestion of Sir Vidia Naipaul after his father died, is a portrait of the male relations across five generations in his own family. Described as "breezily irreverent" by John Banville in The New York Review of Books, it formed the basis of a BBC Four television documentary, presented by the author, which was broadcast in 2006. He was the general editor of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh (43 volumes planned), a project which began in 2009 with the first four volumes appearing in 2017 published by the Oxford University Press.
Waugh's biography of the Wittgenstein family (The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War) was published in 2008. Terry Eagleton in a review for The Guardian found it an "eminently readable, meticulously researched account of the Wittgenstein madhouse". Although he thought Waugh wrote less about Ludwig Wittgenstein than he would desire, he "certainly casts some light" on the philosopher's "extraordinary contradictions." Philosopher Ray Monk in his review for Standpoint magazine commented that Waugh, in his account of a substantial portion of the Wittgenstein family fortune ending up with the Nazis, uses "much hitherto unknown documentation" and "Waugh's version is more authoritative and fuller than previous accounts." Monk writes that concert pianist Paul Wittgenstein gains the largest share of the text and much of the book is written from his viewpoint.
His other books include Time: From Microseconds to Millennia; A Search for the Right Time (1999) and God (2002). In Evelyn Waugh: Fictions, Faith and Family, Michael G. Brennan described Time as being "one of the most intriguing books produced by" any of his later family. "Ranging through religious, classical and renaissance scholarship, it blends past beliefs and theories, often in gently subversive ways, with more recent scientific thought."
Waugh was an advocate of the Oxfordian theory, which contends that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the works of William Shakespeare. He discovered what he claims to be surreptitious allusions embedded in 16th- and 17th-century works revealing that the name William Shakespeare was a pseudonym used by Oxford to write the Shakespeare oeuvre. Of one example which gained coverage in October 2013, Shakespearean scholar Professor Stanley Wells told The Sunday Times: "I’m mystified that an intelligent person like Alexander Waugh can see any significance in this kind of juggling with letters."
Waugh's book, Shakespeare in Court (2014) takes the form of a fictional trial which draws the conclusion that Shakespeare was a front for others but, on this occasion, does not propose another candidate. He was elected chairman of the De Vere Society in spring 2016 for a three-year term.
In late October 2017, The Guardian reported that Waugh believed the title and dedication of the William Aspley edition of Shakespeare's sonnets of 1609 hold encrypted evidence of the final resting place of the author: de Vere's grave in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner.
Waugh married 3 November, 1990, Elizabeth Beatrice 'Eliza' Chancellor (born 1964), scion of that landed gentry family, daughter of the journalist Alexander Surtees Chancellor (1940-2017), and his wife the former Susanna Elizabeth Debenham (born 20 September, 1943), scion of the Debenham baronets, by whom he had issue, three children, a son, Auberon (born 21 April, 1998), and two daughters, Mary (born 1993), and Sally (born 1995).
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