Scoop

Scoop (1938) is Waugh's hilarious send-up of the newspaper industry. When the Daily Beast's proprietor Lord Copper wants to send a fashionable novelist to cover a civil war in the fictional African state of Ishmaelia, a mix-up dispatches the unworldly William Boot instead — a man whose greatest literary achievement is a nature column about badgers. Despite his total incompetence, Boot stumbles into the scoop of the century. One of the funniest novels in English.