Tom Stoppard has sometimes gone by the pseudonym William Boot. Harry Worth played the character in a 1972 BBC television series, which was an adaptation of the novel scripted by Barry Took.Michael Maloney played William Boot in a 1987 British television movie entitled Scoop, produced by LWT.Yet another suggested candidate as the model for Boot was the Daily Mail's gardening correspondent for 50 years, Percy Izzard (1877-1968). Deedes himself said he 'spent part of my life brushing aside the charge,' but admitted 'that my inexperience and naivety as a reporter in Africa might have contributed a few bricks to the building of Boot.' īarring the question of age, a more appropriate model for Boot may be William Beach Thomas who, according to Peter Stothard, 'was a quietly successful countryside columnist and literary gent who became a calamitous Daily Mail war correspondent' in World War I. It has been suggested that Waugh based the character of William Boot on his own experiences and on the legendary journalist Bill Deedes the two had reported together in 1936, trying to cover the Second Italo-Abyssinian War and Deedes arrived in Addis Ababa aged 22 with almost 600 pounds of luggage. Although he is completely inept, he accidentally gets the 'scoop' of the title. After the Daily Beast's publisher mistakes him for the 'real' war correspondent John Boot, William is sent abroad as a foreign correspondent to the fictional African state of Ishmaelia which is on the brink of a civil war. His affected style is typified in the notorious sentence 'Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole'.

Character īoot is the young author of a regular column on country life for a London newspaper named the Daily Beast. Edmund Wilson argued that there were two Evelyn Waughs: the great comic genius of his early novels Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), Scoop (1938)and the religiously obsessed author of Brideshead Revisited (1945), whose success made Waugh internationally famous and in Wilson’s view no longer interesting. William Boot is a fictional journalist who is the protagonist in the 1938 Evelyn Waugh comic novel Scoop.

For the English artist, illustrator and author, see William Henry James Boot.

Evelyn waugh 1938 novel