Firbank, Mottram and Hensher: Roundup

Posted on August 12, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

–The London Review of Books has published a major article on the works of novelist Ronald Firbank. This is by Alan Hollinghurst and is entitled “It’s queer how I’m lonely.”  This is not the first such effort to revive an interest in Firbank. Nor is it surprising that Waugh’s views on Firbank are prominently on display. Here’s an excerpt:

…It’s evident that Firbankianism was from the start both a technical and a moral quantity. In the generation who were first strongly influenced by Firbank, Evelyn Waugh constitutes the most striking case of this duality.

Waugh’s essay, written at the time of the first collected edition in 1929 (for which Firbank had allocated funds in his will), is the first intelligent appraisal of him by a major fellow novelist and invaluable testimony to the impact Firbank’s formal innovations and humour had made on the generation of writers emerging in the decade after the Great War, among whom Waugh listed Van Vechten, William Gerhardi and Ernest Hemingway. For Waugh, Firbank was a liberator, the person who had seen how to take the novel forward as a form. His technique, Waugh perceived, was compositional rather than narrative: ‘His compositions built up, intricately and with a balanced alternation of the wildest extravagance and the most austere economy, with conversational nuances.’ At the same time, Firbank does not write the ‘novel of conversation’, since there is rarely any significant exchange of views: ‘From the fashionable chatter of his period, vapid and interminable, he has plucked, like tiny brilliant feathers from the breast of a bird, the particles of his design.’ This insightful, sophisticated essay is one of those moments where you see a live spark leap from one generation to the next. Waugh was just getting going on Vile Bodies at the time – a novel whose first part is one of the most Firbankian texts produced by any other writer, showing an influence so strong that it had to be tamed (and is tempered already in the latter parts of the book), though Firbankian principles of economy and absurdity, the way people react and talk at an oblique angle to their meanings, remained operative in Waugh’s fiction until the end.

Thirty-three years later, when the seven completed chapters of Firbank’s last and most unbuttoned novel, The New Rythum, were published, the literary editor of the Spectator had the bright idea of asking Waugh to review it, and got the following postcard in reply: ‘I am sorry to say that your kind invitation to review The New Rythum reaches me thirty years late. In youth I was fascinated by Firbank. Now I can’t abide him. E.W.’ Interviewed around the same time by Julian Jebb for the Paris Review, Waugh was asked about his influences, and named in first place P.G. Wodehouse, while also acknowledging a debt to Hemingway and ‘the way he made drunk people talk’ in The Sun Also Rises. Pressed about Firbank, Waugh acknowledges nothing, and again says, ‘I can’t read him now’; asked why not, he says: ‘I think there would be something wrong with an elderly man who could enjoy Firbank.’

The full article is available at this link.

–The National Review has an article by George Weigel in which he traces Donald Trump’s origins to a fictional Waugh character. The article is entitled “A Tiny Bit of a Man’: Evelyn Waugh’s Anticipation of Donald Trump.” Here’s an excerpt:

More than 70 years ago, while on leave from the Royal Marines, Evelyn Waugh penned a portrait of a buccaneering moneyman with political ambitions and a hollow interior, a sketch that rings loud bells of familiarity in today’s presidential campaign.

When Rex Mottram first appears in Brideshead Revisited, it’s not clear what the source of his wealth is…

The truth about Rex — that there’s really no there there — begins to emerge when, in order to please the very Catholic Lady Marchmain, Julia’s mother, Rex decides to convert to Catholicism …

Waugh’s dissection of Rex Mottram (who bears some similarities to Max Aitkin, Lord Beaverbrook) extended to Rex’s politics, which were elastic. At first he’s comfortable with the Tories, whose old money, if not always invested wisely by Mottram standards, nonetheless speaks of a social stature he craves. Later, as the political winds blow from other directions, Rex blows with them, “flirt[ing] with communists and fascists,” moving with dispatch wherever opportunity and power beckon.

At the bottom of Rex Mottram, there is no bottom; or, as Julia puts it: “Rex isn’t anybody at all. . . . He just doesn’t exist,” as least in any humanly substantial way. He isn’t so much stupid as utterly ignorant. He isn’t so much immoral as amoral. He isn’t wantonly cruel; he’s simply callous, unable to understand how others could not perceive that his way is the best way, the expedient way, successful way – the only way, these days.

Julia is Sebastian Flyte’s sister who marries Rex (not happily as it turns out). The full article is available here. 

–Today’s Guardian has a review by Kathryn Hughes of novelist Philip Hensher’s new work. This is non-fiction and is entitled A History of the Novel in Britain. It is headed by a familiar photo of Waugh holding a pipe. Here is an excerpt:

In his opening paragraph, Philip Hensher declares that a novel not only “tells a good story” but is a good story in itself. We could extend that neat formula to include this book, which is not only a masterful account of fiction since 1719, when Daniel Defoe set Robinson Crusoe down on his desert island, but is itself a wonderful read. There is nothing dreary here; no sense of being back in the seminar room taking notes. Instead it is 600 pages of deep pleasure, an excuse to revisit old literary loves and be reminded of ones that have slipped from view…

The article also briefly mentions an appearance of Waugh in the text:

…Hensher never falls into crankiness, but he is unafraid to point out home truths. Such as the fact that so much of the pleased-with-itself “experimentalism” of the 1960 to 1980 period was merely a retread of things that had been done better before. Tickled by the clever wheeze of having central characters with no name? Fanny Burney was already doing that in 1814. Keen on using fragmentary collage to signal modernity? That blustery old fogey Evelyn Waugh got there first with Vile Bodies (1930). As for self-reflexivity, that device by which the novelist comments on the process of writing a novel, you should go back to Fielding…

The review can be read in full at this link.

 

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Roundup: A Twofer for Anthony Blanche

Posted on August 4, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Oldie has posted an interesting article by Mark McGinness on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the Heywood Hill bookshop in Mayfair. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Giving a twist to Dr Johnson’s “When a man is tired of London; he is tired of life”, American editor, Roger Kimball, has suggested, “When a man is tired of Heywood Hill, he is tired of books.”

The eponymous bookshop at 10 Curzon Street, Mayfair is 90 today. On 3 August 1936 George Heywood Hill (always Heywood), a young Old Etonian (just thirty), after a seven-year apprenticeship with veteran bookseller Charles Sawyer in Grafton Street (“everything suitable for a gentleman’s library”), established his own shop, first, at 17 Curzon Street; then, when the lease expired in 1942, at a former dress shop at No 10. And so it has remained, despite three changes of ownership, essentially unchanged.

Someone dubbed it “the biggest little bookshop in the world” while Heywood called it “a tiny first-class kennel for underdogs”; Evelyn Waugh described it, in the early forties, as “a centre for all that was left of fashionable and intellectual London”. Celebrating its fiftieth birthday, antiquarian James Fergusson saw “behind the Georgian bow window ……. [inside] like an overdressed West End stage-set ….marbled pillars with bold gold Ionic capitals are borrowed for a proscenium; a white panelled front room gives way to an unlikely bright burgundy backstage sanctum, and the books, like Helen Hanff props, tumble too neatly on the rich red carpet.” The chandeliered rooms, fireplace and chimney-piece give it the feel of a most clubbable club…

The full article is available here and is well worth reading.

–An article entitled “Brideshead’s Jewish secret” appears in a recent issue of The Jewish Chronicle. This is by Michele Goldsmith and is about the Sassoon family home of Trent Park House in Enfield. Here’s an excerpt in which the title is explained:

…if imitation is the greatest form of flattery, there is a widespread assumption that Evelyn Waugh partly based the character of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited on Sassoon. As Page observes: “Both Sassoon and the character are wealthy, flamboyant aesthetes, a little haughty, gay, with slight lisps.

The setting is often Oxford, where Philip studied and lived, and the actor chosen to play Blanche in the film [Joseph Beattie] even looks like Sassoon.”

The reference in the article is to Philip Sassoon who inherited the house at age 23 in 1912. The article, which is handsomely illustrated, is available here.

–Anthony Blanche is also featured this week in another article. This is in a recent issue of  The Spectator. It is entitled “In defence of the Brandy Alexander: It’s not simply a drink for young fogeys.” This is by Christopher Akens. Here’s a relevant excerpt:

In the 1962 film Days of Wine and Roses, the Brandy Alexander is the catalyst for teetotaller secretary Kirsten descending into alcoholism. Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Mother Night references ‘a pansy full of Brandy Alexanders’. This unfortunate view of the cocktail wasn’t helped by the memorable scene in the glorious 1981 television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited in which the stammering Anthony Blanche (played superbly by Nickolas Grace) downs four Brandy Alexanders in flamboyant fashion.

The article is available at this link.

–Finally, a brief review of Scoop appears in the Encyclopedia of Satire. This is by Dr. Ingrid Gustafsson:

Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (1938) is the foundational text of satirical fiction about journalism in English. Its portrait of Fleet Street journalism — the proprietorial vanity that shapes editorial policy, the journalistic conventions that substitute excitement for accuracy, the foreign correspondent culture that invents the stories it fails to find — remains recognizable eight decades after its publication, which is itself a satirical comment on the unchanging nature of journalistic failure. Waugh’s technique is Horatian in its formal comedy but Juvenalian in its underlying contempt: he laughs at the absurdity of the journalistic world while making clear that its failures have real consequences for the people who are reported on and the societies whose affairs it claims to record. Newspaper satire’s full tradition in Britain traces the literary and journalistic lineage of which Waugh’s novel is the central achievement.

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World Cup Roundup

Posted on July 25, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Wall Street Journal has posted an article by Christopher Scalia in its Opinion section. This is entitled “Stand Tall, Short Kings: A proposal for a 5-foot-7 Hall of Fame.” It is inspired by Scalia’s recent immersion in the World Cup soccer tournament, where a major player (Lionel Messi) was of that dimension. After much discussion comparing Messi’s success with other athletes of this height, Scalia searched for other examples of success by those in other fields of endeavor. Here’s an example:

…Great writers who reach the Messi Mark include W. Somerset Maugham. I learned of Maugham’s stature from a frequent contributor to these pages, the 5-foot-7 Joseph Epstein, whose many excellent essays include one about his height. I’ve read that Evelyn Waugh was also that height and I like him so I believe it…

–The Polish journal Tygodnik Powszechny has published an article about the impact of the Brideshead Revisited TV adaptation on the Polish audience. This is by Dorota Kozinska and is entitled “A Lament for Loss: Evelyn Waugh and Brideshead Revisited.” Here’s a translation of the opening paragraph:

The first episode of “Brideshead Revisited” aired in Poland on January 6, 1990, on a Saturday evening on Channel 2, just over nine years after its British premiere. The country was shaking to its foundations, the old system was ending, and great hopes were mingled with fear and uncertainty. On the gray streets and in the gray apartments, little had changed. Images of the waning communist era have so effectively blended in my memory with the birth of the Third Polish Republic that if it weren’t for the help of a film expert friend who dug up the broadcast date from the old Polish Television schedule, I would have pushed the series’ premiere back by at least three years…

For anyone wishing to pursue the remainder of the article, it appeared on 04/03/2023 as No. 11/2023 of the journal.

–On the website Wallenstein’s Camp an article posted by Stephen Webb is of some interest. This is entitled “Where Did the Downwardly Mobile Live?” The discussion includes references to the lives of many literary characters who will be familiar to our readers (e.g., the “Major” from Fawlty Towers and Uncle Giles from Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. The article includes this in its concluding paragraphs:

…By the war time period, the literature of the period shows hotel residents as in further decline, with their position disrupted by evacuation and billeting. The narrator’s father Gervase Crouchback in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy has sold his ancestral home for it to be turned into a minor catholic boarding school (with two houses, amusingly named Crouchback and Holy Family). He has retired to rooms in a seaside town, which he shares with other marginal figures struggling to hold on to their rooms in the face of the billeting officer. Agatha Christie’s wartime detective couple Tommy and Tuppence track down German spies in a very similar milieu.

The full article is available on Substack.

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“Milk-in First”: Waugh’s Perspective (Roundup)

Posted on July 18, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Times has published an early interview of new PM Andy Burnham which relies on a well-known Evelyn Waugh opinion:

The prime minister in waiting is already in hot water after admitting he puts milk in first when making tea to “soften” the bag.

In a rapid-fire questions style interview with the PoliticsUK website, Andy Burnham was asked for his stance on topics ranging from socks and sandals (for), single-file queuing at bars (against) and making a brew.

He said he put milk in first. “I don’t know why. I just have a feeling that it softens the tea bag a bit and makes it stronger,” he said. “I might be wrong, and I know that will offend a lot of people, but there will be no legislation to ban that.”

The debate may have its roots in the class system. Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1955 that “all nannies and many governesses, when pouring out tea, put the milk in first … sharp children notice that this is not normally done in the drawing-room”…

–The London Review of Books has somewhat belatedly published a rather detailed review of Melanie McDonagh’s book Converts. This is by Michael Ledger-Lomax and is entitled “Pattern in the Carpet”. After an extended discussion, the book concludes with a comparison of how converts Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene reflected their faith in their writings. Here’s an excerpt:

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) showed that Waugh could rouse himself to think innovatively about the way the supernatural might bend the novel to breaking point. The voices that accuse its tweedy convert hero of imaginary crimes turn the cabin of his ocean liner into a demonic confessional and their menace lingers even after we learn Pinfold caused them by the improper mixing of medications. Pinfold could have been a patron saint for a Catholic postmodernism. Waugh recognised as much when he welcomed Muriel Spark’s first novel, The Comforters (1957), as an essentially Catholic book. Spark, a self-described ‘Gentile Jewess’ who had converted to Canterbury then Rome in quick succession, pursued in this and subsequent novels a sort of Roman Calvinism in which her characters become uneasily aware of their hard and sometimes brutal manipulation by a narrator who is as indifferent to the small facts of time and space as is God himself…

—The Wall Street Journal has posted an article prominently citing Evelyn Waugh in which it considers the quality of writing that may be produced by a machine against that produced by humans. Here’s the opening:

Regarding Richard Dooling’s “AI and the English Language” (op-ed, July 3): Evelyn Waugh once said that the English language is “incomparably rich and can convey every thought accurately and elegantly.” Its craftsmen bear a weighty responsibility. A large language model can sift, sort and mimic to perfection, but to what degree does the final outcome of a piece of writing depend on how much the writer, human or machine, is capable of caring about its quality?

A machine will write faster, but can it write better? Its words will be blandly pleasing, but can they sparkle? Will it bring a reader to tears? And what of the matter of instinct and feel, those aspects of artistic creation beyond the reach of logic?…

–Finally, the New Criterion has published an article by David Platzer that marks the 40th anniversary of the death of a person close to Waugh. This is Diana Cooper. Here are the opening paragraphs:

June 16, 2026, was the fortieth anniversary of the death of Lady Diana Cooper (1892–1986). Her departure was a melancholy landmark for those of us familiar with her reputation as not only the most beautiful and glamorous of women but also a great eccentric. Evelyn Waugh portrayed her as Julia Stitch, D. H. Lawrence as Artemis Hooper, and Enid Bagnold as Lady Ruby Maclean. In the 1980s, the popular press was fascinated by another Lady Di—a term it had pinned on our Lady Diana decades before—but the two women shared little other than a first name and aristocratic background. Lady Diana Cooper, though haphazardly educated in the way of well-born girls of her period, was full of wit and intelligence, knew Greek mythology, and could recite Shakespeare by heart.

At the time of her death, three volumes of her classic autobiography—The Rainbow Comes and Goes (1958), The Light of Common Day (1959), and Trumpets from the Steep (1960)—were in print, their titles all borrowed from Wordsworth. Philip Ziegler’s biography Diana Cooper was published in 1981, and Diana’s granddaughter Artemis Cooper edited and published Diana’s correspondences with her husband, Duff Cooper (1890–1954), under the name of A Durable Fire (1983). Artemis also published two other books on Diana: The Diana Cooper Scrapbook (1987) and Mr. Wu and Mrs. Stitch (1991), a book of letters between Evelyn Waugh and Diana…

 

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Evelyn Waugh Studies 56.3

Posted on July 8, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

Number 56.3 of Evelyn Waugh Studies has been issued and circulated to members. Here is a summary of its contents from Jamie Collinson:

“…The feature essay happens to marry two of my own strongest interests – and ones I’d considered irreconcilable: Waugh and postmodernism. In Waugh’s Postmodern Pilgrimage, Catherine Simmerer makes the case that: ‘Brideshead Revisited complicates the traditional long nineteenth century novel by undermining the purely humanist nature of the traditional novel form, in introducing a sacred dimension and by breaking the bildungsroman narrative cycle of home-adventure-return.’ The essay makes a highly original and insightful case, and is one of the best pieces on Waugh I’ve read recently.

Elsewhere in this edition: Marshall McGraw is amusingly unimpressed by Flyte or Fancy: You Decide: Evelyn Waugh Meets Harry Clifton on the Road to Brideshead, by David Slattery-Christy…”

A copy of the issue is available at this link.

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4th of July (US) Roundup

Posted on July 2, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Daily Telegraph has posted a letter from a reader who comments on Simon Heffer’s article on rereading Brideshead Revisited that was mentioned in our last posting:

SIR – Simon Heffer suggests that Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited “isn’t that good after all” (Hinterland, June 20).

I would argue that, as an elegy for the great country house and its inhabitants, which were in decline in the second half of the 20th century, the novel is unique.

Fortunately, Waugh’s pessimism was only partly justified. Though a great number of such houses were demolished in the year’s following the novel’s publication, a surprising number still exist and remain in the hands of families that built them. They are a significant part of our shared heritage.

For the way it deals with this important subject, Brideshead stands apart from Waugh’s other novels, as well as those of his contemporaries.

Robin Bryer, Yeovil, Somerset

The letter is reproduced in the Telegraph’s 23 June 2026 issue under the heading Rereading Brideshead.

–Vice President J. D. Vance has written a book entitled Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. This had been widely reviewed, and the following comments appeared as the opening paragraph of the review on the Substack website Quillette:

The novelist Evelyn Waugh was once asked how he reconciled his lousy personal behaviour—which included drunkenness, antisemitism, and cruelty to friends and foes alike—with his Catholic faith. No one could imagine, Waugh replied, how vile he would have been were he not a Catholic. That retort came to mind as I read US vice president JD Vance’s new book, Communion, about his conversion to Catholicism. Since joining the Church of Rome in 2019, Vance has not exactly been a paragon of virtue. Once an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, whom he called “America’s Hitler,” he changed his tune as soon as he needed Trump’s endorsement. (“I need to just suck it up and support him,” he confessed.)…

The full review is available at this link. A similar point may have been made in a review by Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal but is unavailable without a subscription.

–Another Substack post also contains a discussion about Waugh. This relates to his breakdown which he described in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Here is the opening:

What happens when a master of sharp, satirical prose completely loses his grip on reality in the middle of the Indian Ocean?

The Legend of Evelyn Waugh and His Literary Madness

By the 1950s, British novelist Evelyn Waugh had become well-respected for his early satirical novels Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust, and Brideshead Revisited.

But then in the winter of 1954, he suffered a terrible stint of writer’s block. Struggling to bring words to the page, he boarded a cruise ship bound for Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), hoping a change of scenery would spark his creativity again.

He was seeking inspiration and adventure. Instead, he stepped into a real-life psychological horror story…

The full article by Julie Cantrell is available here.

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Juneteenth (US) Roundup

Posted on June 20, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

–Simon Heffer has written for the Daily Telegraph an article entitled: “Never mind the lavish TV series–Brideshead Revisited is a woefully overrated novel: Time has not improved Waugh’s celebrated classic, whose glamour disguises a surprisingly joyless vision of humanity”.  The article opens with this history of Heffer’s readings of the novel:

I feel I missed the right time of life to read Brideshead Revisited, the novel which Waugh with an apparently straight face, described as his “magnum opus”. I was about 17 when I first devoured it and found it highly devouring, though even in the arrogance of youth, I realised I probably wasn’t “getting” all of it. Now, almost half a century later, I have just read it again, and realise I should almost certainly have revisited Brideshead Revisited about 25 years ago when I was the same age as the central character (I resist saying “hero” because he isn’t one), Charles Ryder. Then I might have “got” it more profoundly. Now, characters and situations that seemed devilishly funny when I was an impressionable youth seem simply ghastly, and I wonder whether this highly acclaimed novel is actually half as good as most think it is…

What follows is an admittedly biased but thorough, accurate and entertaining summary of the novel from Heffer’s present point of view. He concludes with this:

…On my re-reading, I was overcome by the utter bleakness of the story. Waugh was brutally cynical from birth and a pretty unpleasant man, but the war and the upheaval of society in which he felt reasonably comfortable poisoned his spirit. With the exception of Cordelia, the Marchmain’s youngest child, who had the makings of a saint, every major character in the book and most of the minor ones are rather loathsome, usually because they are so self-obsessed and morally defective. Although Lady Marchmain and Lord Brideshead, her elder son, are devout, they are also obnoxious in their narrow-mindedness. Waugh’s ridicule, notably of Charles’s cranky father, now seem overdone, and the humour of the snobbery soon wears thin. I am in no doubt that Brideshead Revisited is a book that every intelligent person should read, but only once, and preferably in early middle age.

A link to the full article is available here but it may require a subscription to open it. I may say that some specific mention of Anthony Blanche as being among the memorable characters might have been appreciated.

–The Rising Tide Foundation has posted on YouTube the recording of a lecture entitled “How the British Empire Created and Destroyed Orwell”. The lecturer is Martin Sieff. The recording (presumably with Q&A) runs for about 2 hours. Here is the description of a 8 minute segment:

[12:04] – The Paradoxical Contemporary: George Orwell vs. Evelyn Waugh A fascinating contrast between two literary giants who deeply admired yet utterly baffled one another—the secular socialist who loathed empire versus the traditionalist Catholic monarchist who loved it.

The entire lecture and the summary may be accessed here.

—Literary Review has posted the review of a book by Ollie Randall about the literary side of the game of cricket. This is entitled Writers in Whites: How a Group of Literary Cricketeers Changed English Culture. The Waugh brothers make a contribution according to the LR’s review:

…[J.M.] Barrie also enlisted the services of Alec Waugh, a capable batsman whose first novel, The Loom of Youth (1917), was well received. Shortly after its publication, Waugh was captured on the Western Front, the event ‘generating a burst of headlines’, and spent the rest of the war in a fortress at Mainz. His younger brother, Evelyn, wrote a sour account of his only outing on the field of play, while Alec recorded that his ‘attempts to teach [Evelyn] cricket inculcated in him a permanent repugnance for the game’…

The full review is available here.

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Early June Roundup

Posted on June 8, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

–The British Medical Journal has posted an article from 1975 in which a professional psychiatrist reviews the 1957 novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. This appeared in the December 1975 issue of the professional magazine. The author is identified as Eliot Slater. The first page of the article has been reproduced and posted on the internet. Here is an excerpt from that page in which Dr. Slater describes Waugh’s book as:

“…a novel and not a medical document. A lot of novelist’s work has gone into it, with its elaborately interwoven conspiracies and hallucinatory voices speaking in perfect syntax. Nevertheless, one finds evidence that Waugh’s psychotic episode was passed in a state of clouded consciousness. Pinfold describes defective memories and disorientation in time. Most telling of all, the characters of the story have not been observed at all, least of all with Waugh’s habitually penetrating and sardonic eye. The story is an absurdity. Gilbert Pinfold is presented as a hero of titanic strength. He defends himself against his persecutors, confident he will be the victor. He unravels the “truth” of the conspiracies, defies the conspirators, reduces them to pleading for mercy, and eventually to silence. On return home he sees no priest, no psychiatrist, no medical specialist. He knows that he has endured “a great ordeal and, unaided, had emerged the victor.” Waugh v the Powers of Hell.

Given his personality it is no wonder that Evelyn Waugh had a paranoid psychosis; the wonder is that it needed drug intoxication, on top of alcoholism and his increasing deafness, to produce it. He got no promotion in the Army all through the war because of his total unfitness to be an officer. He could not be put in command of men because he bullied them and he hated them. He antagonised others by his delight in causing offence or by his own ostentatious indiscipline. Unaware of his failings, he put it all down to plots and machinations…

Dr. Slater was obviously aware of Waugh’s own personal response to the Pinfold episode which included medical and religious intervention. He mentions the Sykes biography, which was published the same year as the BMJ’s article, where these details are revealed (Sykes, Penguin, pp. 485ff). He may well address that historic response in the later pages of his article. The remainder of the article apparently may be viewed on the BMJ’s website which is available at this link. It is not mentioned in Waugh’s bibliography which appeared in 1986 and I cannot recall seeing it cited in later articles. Dr. Slater does include it among the extensive list of his publications in his archives. These are available here.

—The Daily Telegraph has an article about the unfinished cathedral in Barcelona which Waugh described in his 1930 travel book Labels (ch. VI). The article is entitled “La Sagrada Familia is Gaudi’s masterpiece. It’s also hideous.” In the article, author Stephen Bayley explains how the design and construction of Barcelona church differs from the usual  cathedrals. He notes that Orwell, who saw it a few years after Waugh, had thought it so defective that it should be torn down. The article concludes with this:

…Evelyn Waugh was more enthused by La Sagrada Família than Orwell. He visited in 1930 and it reminded him of the terrible bungalow communities on the South Coast. Thinking, perhaps of Peacehaven, Waugh found in Barcelona: “The same eagerness to attract attention”. He saw an “irresponsible confusion of architectural styles”. Gaudí, Waugh said, broke through “all boundaries of order and propriety”. This he did, leaving others to tidy up after him.

But the great thing about La Sagrada Família is what it tells us about ugliness and its place in our culture. And this is that ugliness is not boring, while sterile perfection often is. Mies van der Rohe’s hyper-modernist 1929 Barcelona Pavilion has been rebuilt on its original site. The Catalan tourist authorities are not much moved to promote it, beautiful as it may be.

As for the architect, in 1926 Gaudí was run over by a tram on the Gran via de les Corts Catalanes. He was looking so shabby, officials took several days to identify the body.

The complete article is available here.

There is also an article about the Barcelona church posted on the website Prufrock. This is by Micah Mattix and contains an extensive quote from Waugh’s travel book Labels. The article concludes with this:

…If you have never read Waugh’s Labels, summer is the perfect time, and Waugh is at his best in the book. Here’s the first sentence: “I did not really know where I was going, so, when anyone asked me, I said to Russia. Thus my trip started, like an autobiography, upon a rather nicely qualified basis of falsehood and self-glorification.” Perfect.

Here’s a link.

–London bookseller Peter Harrington has on offer a first edition copy of Work Suspended with an interesting back story:

First edition, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “Frank from Evelyn, Christmas 1942”, and housed in a fine onlaid folding box. The recipient was his friend Frank Pakenham, later Lord Longford, an old associate from Oxford, the godfather of Waugh’s son Auberon, and a companion with whom Waugh spent Christmas 1930 at Pakenham Hall in Westmeath, Ireland.

During their university years, Pakenham (1905-2001) edited the Oxford Fortnightly Review, which announced that “Evelyn Waugh made a perilous but successful journey to Oxford the week before last on Queensbury, his new motor-bicycle, and a few were privileged to watch him, leather-coated and leather-helmeted, pushing it along the Corn in a gallant but blasphemous effort to shame [it] into some sort of activity” (cited in Stannard, p. 123). Waugh wrote to him about his place as a writer during wartime, stating that the conflict’s “chief use would be to cure artists of the illusion that they were men of action”, a lesson Waugh admits he learned slower than Pakenham (Carpenter, p. 351).

Work Suspended was the title given to the fragments of a novel Waugh abandoned to take up active service, not published until his return. It is one of 500 copies printed.

The book is on offer for £4,000. Here’s a link.

–After facing much criticism for its recent list of the 100 best novels based on a survey of literary critics and journalists, the Guardian has conducted a survey of its readers. While nothing by Waugh appeared in the first list, Brideshead Revisited appears as No. 75 in the more recent one. The entry also includes this comment:

Declan Durrant, South Australia, 28: “It is the great novel from possibly the greatest prose stylist of the 20th century. Creamy and redolent with excess and guilt and moral decay in a lost England which, perhaps, never existed – and if it did, maybe shouldn’t have.”

The entire list can be accessed through this link.

—Literary Review has published a review of the recent book that is a history of the writing and publication of the novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover. This is entitled Flailing Fornication and is written by Guy Cuthbertson. The review is by Duncan Fallowell. Here is an excerpt from the opening paragraphs:

…Unsurprisingly, Lady C is replete with drama and farce. We learn that the novel’s passionate admirers included W B Yeats, Philip Larkin, Hermann Hesse, Stevie Smith, Norman Mailer, Anaïs Nin, Tennessee Williams, E M Forster, Madonna and David Bowie. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath revered it; for Plath, Hughes became a Mellors-gamekeeper fantasy. The haters included Evelyn Waugh, Edith Sitwell, W H Auden and Enid Blyton. F R Leavis did not admit the novel into the Lawrentian canon because, as Cuthbertson perceptively observes, it ‘was a book Leavis was not in control of’. T E Lawrence delivered the classic dismissal of those who can’t cope with Eros at all: ‘Surely the sex business isn’t worth all this damned fuss?’ …

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Donat Gallagher (12 June 1929 – 17 January 2026) R.I.P.

Posted on June 5, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

The death in January of Professor Donat Gallagher was reported in a recent posting by the Australian literary magazine Quadrant. Professor Gallagher has been among the leading experts on the life and works of Evelyn Waugh since the 1970s. He wrote and edited several books and articles about Waugh, most notably the collected journalism in Essays, Articles and Reviews (1983). He was on the faculty of James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland, Australia and was living there in retirement at the time of his death at the age of 96. He was active in the Evelyn Waugh Society’s activities and made the long trip from Australia (with his wife, Mary, who survives him) to participate in its conferences. A more detailed description of Prof. Gallagher’s life and work by Mark McGinness is available on Quadrant. 

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End-of-Month Roundup

Posted on May 31, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Modernist Review has posted an article relating to Alec Waugh’s 1917 book Loom of Youth in which he described his school days at Sherborne. The book is well known among Evelyn Waugh enthusiasts because it resulted in Evelyn’s  being barred from admission at his preferred boarding school, Sherborne. It also resulted in a little known law suit several years later in 1932 as is explained in the opening paragraphs of the Modernist Review article by Thomas Bate entitled “Loom and Doom: New Light on the Waugh v. Lewis Libel Action.”

One could hardly imagine two more different works than The Loom of Youth (1917) and Doom of Youth (1932). The former, the first novel of Alec Waugh (elder brother of Evelyn), was a boy’s account of a boys’ school, which became controversial principally because of a brief passage suggesting homosexuality in the dormitories. Published when Waugh was barely 21, The Loom of Youth drew directly from his experiences at Sherborne School, from which he had been expelled — a circumstance that would later prompt his parents to send his younger brother Evelyn to Lancing College instead. The novel’s frank portrayal of public school life, with its hints at same-sex relationships among the boys, caused a sensation and marked Alec Waugh as a voice of his generation’s disillusionment with traditional institutions.

The latter publication, by the vituperative writer and painter Wyndham Lewis, was a savage satirical assault on what he perceived as the shallow hedonism and intellectual bankruptcy of post-war youth culture. Published in 1932, Doom of Youth represented Lewis at his most provocative and combative, railing against the very generation that [Alec] Waugh had seemed to champion. Where Waugh’s novel had been sympathetic to the struggles of young men coming of age in oppressive institutional settings, Lewis’s polemic was a sustained attack on youth itself as a cultural phenomenon, dismissing the concerns and perspectives of the younger generation as fundamentally worthless.

But Lewis’s provocative choice of title was clearly aimed at Waugh’s earlier success, a deliberate echo designed to position his own work as a riposte to The Loom of Youth. The similarity was no accident — Lewis, ever the polemicist, had crafted his title as both homage and hostile takeover, suggesting that he was the corrective for the Waugh brothers’ obsession with youth culture. This calculated provocation would prove to be more costly than Lewis anticipated…

The resulting litigation over the Lewis book is described in the article which is available at this link.

–Hungarian academic Ferenc Hörcher has posted a copy of his 2022 article on Waugh’s war trilogy. This was originally published in Hungarian Review and is entitled “History and Grace: Anti-communism in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour.” Here is an excerpt from the opening paragraphs:

“Sword of Honour, written during the Cold War (1952–1961), was meant to provide
a general account of British participation in the Second World War, with an eye
to its aftermath, since the global conflict was widely seen as having strengthened
communist Russia. Its author, a popular writer of the age, was himself a traditional
Conservative who was nevertheless an ardent critic of the British prime minister
and wartime leader, Winston Churchill. Waugh participated in the war, and his
experiences led him to a pessimistic view of the leadership of the British Army,
and in particular of British participation in the Balkans. He did not agree with
the shift of British support from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to Tito’s partisans
in the war’s final stage. His critical attitude towards the British war effort led
him to write a report directly to the government, and his literary efforts to record
what happened there included—beside the later Sword of Honour—an earlier short
story entitled Compassion.”

The full article is available for download here.

—The Oldie has posted an article by Ferdinand Mount on the career of artist Henry Lamb. He is well known to Waugh’s readers as the artist who painted Waugh’s portrait at age 26 which adorns the cover of the 1973 collection, Evelyn Waugh and his World. Mount’s article is inspired by an exhibit of Lamb’s work that also includes a portrait of Mount. The exhibit recently opened in Salisbury. Here’s a description:

A new show, Bloomsbury in Wiltshire, (Saturday May 23 – Sunday September 27, 2026) features the work of artist Henry Lamb. Lamb drew – and romanced – the Bloomsbury Group, fought in the First World War and, in 1957, painted his 18-year-old nephew, Ferdinand Mount

Whether the earlier Waugh portrait is included in the exhibition is not stated in either The Oldie’s article or the exhibition gallery’s description (see link). The exhibition is in the Salisbury Museum in Wiltshire.

–The Daily Express has an article by Molly Toolan declaring that the 1981 TV adaptation by ITV of Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited is recognized as the best adaptation of all time. Here are some excerpts:

Period drama, released in 1981, Brideshead Revisited was the choice of Lit Hub in its The 50 Greatest Literary TV Adaptations Ever Ranking. The TV series was adapted from Evelyn Waugh’s novel of the same name. Derek Granger created the series that stars Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews…

The series has been hailed by many fans and critics, and publications, with Time magazine listing it in its list of the 100 best TV shows of all time. It has received 83% from both the critics and the fans on Rotten Tomatoes.

“Probably the best TV adaptation of all time,” said one fan of the series.

Another fan wrote in their review: “A brilliant adaptation of the Evelyn Waugh novel with exceptional performances by all, especially Jeremy Irons. One of the most memorable productions in any film format I’ve ever seen.”

“It’s simply one of the best productions ever made for TV from a beloved novel. The characters. Acting. Writing. Music. Sets. Stories. Clothes etc – just perfect. I watched it as a teenager when it first aired, and I’ve been watching it this week. It’s so good,” another added.

–Terry Eagleton has written an article entitled “Why Aristocrats Are Funny”. This is posted on the website UnHerd. Here is an excerpt:

…A lot of humor depends on laws and prohibitions, since without them we would have nothing to transgress, and transgression is usually pleasurable. Deviating from a norm can take the form of eccentricity, especially in England. The English love what they call “a character”, like the Oxford don I once knew who used to stand in a pub with a cavalier air and a parrot on his shoulder. (His cavalier air was shaken only by his obvious fear that the bird might crap on his shoulder.) People who stick ferrets down their trousers or ride to work on a baby rhino are likely to be honored by Buckingham Palace. The upper class in particular are transgressive, since they regard themselves as superior to codes and conventions, even though they often set them themselves. Brian Howard, one of the louche Evelyn Waugh set, was once arrested by the police in an illicit drinking den in Soho. When asked for his name and address, he replied: “My name is Brian Howard, I live in Berkeley Square, and you, Inspector, I suppose, come from some dreary little suburb.”…

NOTE (31 May 2026): Thanks to Dave Lull for pointing out some name confusion on my part among the various Waughs.

 

 

 

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