Officers and Gentlemen

Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1955.

First American Edition. Publisher's cobalt blue cloth. With the excellent and unclipped dust-jacket, lightly rubbed at head of the backstrip; front flap creased; light toning to top margin of the back cover. Without old inscriptions or other interior markings. A near fine copy of the American edition, not often seen in the UK. The second volume in the Sword of Honour trilogy. "Officers and Gentlemen was finished in November 1954. Evelyn Waugh had meant to get on with the third book in the war trilogy soon after, but things hadn't quite worked out that way. The composition of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, a couple of years after the paranoid experience of it, plus the move from Piers Court, Gloucestershire, to Combe Florey, Somerset, took up 1956 and 1957" - evelynwaugh.org.