mandarin

LIKE THE MANDARINS of old, the rulers of China live behind high walls. When they emerge, which they rarely do, they travel in cars with rear windows curtained like sedan chairs.

They live in the Chung Nan Hai, a walled park adjacent to the Forbidden City from where ancient dynasties ruled the Celestial Empire.

Its sting preserved to literature a fierce peculiar genius [Waugh] who, in the 40 years before his death last week at 62, achieved recognition as the grand old mandarin of modern British prose and as a satirist whose skill at sticking pens in people rates him a roomy cell in the murderers’ row (Swift, Pope, Wilde, Shaw) of English letters.