ABSTRACT
In the opening scenes of Evelyn Waugh ’s novel Scoop , William Boot, nature correspondent of the Daily Beast , famous for such lines as ‘feather -footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole …’, is summoned from his remote country seat to the metropolis. The newspaper ’s proprietor, Lord Copper, has been tricked by the brilliantly scheming Mrs Algernon Stitch into appointing Boot war correspondent to the Civil War in the remote country of Ishmaelia. Copper brooks no refusal; every time Boot protests that his speciality is nature, not war, he doubles his salary. Boot goes, and eventually returns a hero, having, through sheer na ïveté and luck, got the story which eluded the sophisticated Fleet Street journalists. But he was the wrong Boot all along. Mrs Stitch ’s protégé was Courtney Boot, the fashionable novelist.
