Waugh's works were very successful with the reading public and he was widely admired as a humorist and as a prose stylist, but as his social conservatism and religiosity became more overt, his works grew more controversial with critics. In his notes for an unpublished review of Brideshead Revisited, George Orwell declared that Waugh was "about as good a novelist as one can be while holding untenable opinions." Martin Amis found that the snobbery of Brideshead was "a failure of imagination, an artistic failure." On the other hand, American literary critic Edmund Wilson pronounced Waugh "the only first-rate comic genius that has appeared in English since Bernard Shaw." Time magazine, in a 1966 obituary, summarised his oeuvre by claiming that Waugh had "developed a wickedly hilarious yet fund