Books: The Great Bore War

PUT OUT MORE FLAGS—Evelyn Waugh —Little, Brown ($2.50). "I am afraid," writes Evelyn Waugh, in a dedicatory letter to his friend Major Randolph Churchill, "that these pages may not be altogether acceptable to your ardent and sanguine nature. They deal, mostly, with a race of ghosts ... in that odd, dead period before the Churchillian renaissance which people called at the time 'the Great Bore War.' "

They are ghosts indeed, weird and touching ones. They have walked the earth ever since Waugh's famed Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, symbols of...