form of Toryism, does not vote, and expresses outrageous views, part-facetiously. Pinfold was "absurd to many but to some rather formidable". After Waugh's death, Nancy Mitford confirmed the essentially mocking nature of Waugh's persona: "What nobody remembers about Evelyn is that everything with him was jokes. Everything". While Waugh's biographer Selina Hastings describes Pinfold as "an accurate and revealing self-portrait", Stannard suggests that it is primarily an analysis of the adopted persona in which, like Pinfold, Waugh "gives nothing away". Paranormal Among Waugh's neighbours in Stinchcombe was Diana Oldridge, known in the Waugh family as "Tanker". She was an organiser of local music festivals, and the possessor of a contraption known as "the Box". This device was reputed to cure all ills, by means of "sympathetic life-waves" working on some physical part of the victim—hairs, nail-clippings, or a drop of blood. Waugh himself was generally sceptical, even scornful of these powers, but some of his acquaintances claimed to have been cured by the Box, as apparently had one of Laura Waugh's cows. In letters to Laura from Cairo and Colombo, Waugh ascribed the voices he was hearing to the power of the Box, and instructs Laura to tell "Tanker" that he now believes in it. In the novel, Pinfold initially dismisses the Box—described as resembling "a makeshift wireless set"—as "a lot of harmless nonsense", but, like Waugh, he is driven to revise his position in the face of his persecution by the voices. He believes that "Angel" is using an adapted form of the Box, as developed by the Germans at the end of the war and perfected by the "Existentialists" in Paris—"a hellish invention in the wrong hands". At the end of his ordeal Pinfold muses that had he not defied Angel but instead compromised with him, he might have continued to believe in the Box's sinister capabilities. He is finally convinced of the non-existence of a box with such powers by the assurances of his priest, Father Westmacott. Religion In contrast with Waugh's other late full-length fiction, religious themes are not prominent in Pinfold. As with earlier novels, the "Catholic gentleman" is subject to a degree of ridicule and mockery; the voices speculate that Pinfold is Jewish, that his real name is "Peinfeld" and that his professed Catholicism is mere humbug invented to ingratiate himself with the aristocracy. Otherwise, Waugh uses the self-revelatory opening chapter of the novel