Summer’s End Roundup

Posted on September 20, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–An article in the New Statesman describes luncheon at the Inner Temple amongst the barristers who frequent the premises. The article is by Finn McRedmond and concludes with this:

…And so, here I am eating my greens in Inner Temple, on a geographic and spiritual vacation from reality. I am metres away from Fleet Street. But it is peaceful and clean, and there are no Superdrugs or Holland & Barretts disrupting the view. It is technically a place of work, but with its quads and Georgian-ish buildings and chandeliered dining rooms, it is drawn more from the imagination of Evelyn Waugh than the HR department at Deloitte.

But it is not just a warm bath for Old Harrovians. It’s aspic for a political moment long lost to us. The legal profession was meant to have changed: Keir Starmer (son of a toolmaker, etc) is now the most famous barrister in the country; Jolyon Maugham, before he beat a fox to death, represented the new lefty-activist class; more than 100 members of the barrister-lobby in 2023 unionised against prosecuting climate protesters, and aren’t they supposed to be using the ECHR to crush right-wing Britain?

The paradigmatic Tory in a gown and wig was supposed to have been replaced by a young woman with an X account and spare keffiyeh. I don’t detect much of that energy in the canteen – these people eat like the most right-wing people in Britain. Bathed in custard, longing for Mummy.

–The Independent has an obituary of Nona Summers, journalist, party goer and sometimes addict. This is by Joan Juliet Buck who describes her subject as “The Gypsy of Chelsea”. Here is an excerpt;

…Born to Austrian parents, Nona was more like Mrs Stitch in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, the society lady of “dazzling, inebriating charm” who drives her little car down the stairs of the men’s lavatory on Sloane Street; or Lady Pauline Leone in Nancy Mitford’s Don’t Tell Alfred, who refuses to vacate the British Embassy residence when her husband’s turn is up. Both Waugh’s Mrs Stitch and Mitford’s Lady Leone were based on Lady Diana Cooper (nĂ©e Lady Diana Manners, 1892).

However, Nona’s aristocratic disregard for rules did not mean she was an aristocrat. Her mother, Fritzi, had fled Austria after the Anschluss and was so intent on the royal flush she’d been dealt in a poker game that legend has it she gave birth under the card table, naming the baby Nona because she was born on 9 March…

–In the website Jericho Writers, Harry Bingham considers opening passages of novels and how they might or might not succeed in a reader’s engagement in the book in question. Here’s the concluding passage:

…As for the too little, too little observation: there I want to say that some openings don’t do enough to gesture at the story that’s to come. They offer a Dramatic Incident, yes, but that Dramatic Incident doesn’t really do enough to guide me as to the shape of what’s to come.

And all this sounds complex, but it’s easy enough to do. Here, for not much reason except that the novel was to hand, is the opening of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:

When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning. We were leaving that day. When we marched in, three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding. I had reflected then that, whatever scenes of desolation lay ahead of us, I never feared one more brutal than this, and I reflected now that it had no single happy memory for me.

Here love had died between me and the army.

As the prologue continues, we learn that the narrator is a captain in the British Army of the Second World War. He’s about to move out of a Scottish training camp with his men.

That’s the bare situation and, yes, it’s interesting enough to sustain us and, yes, small enough that we don’t feel overcrowded by too much story too soon.

But look at those underlinings.

“Paused and looked back”: this whole book is a looking back, a reminiscence. Any novel written in the past tense is, technically, a reminiscence, but BR revels in its nostalgic gaze – makes a feature of it. (The time-of-war narrator looking back at his time-of-peace past emphasises the change in the world between Then and Now.)

“No single happy memory 
 loved had died”: this tells us that there’s a love story here, but an unhappy one, a failure.

That sounds rather bleak: why would you fork out for a book that’s all set to depress you? Except that I think there’s one more bit of (really lovely) foreshadowing which complicates that simple story. Because Waugh also says, “three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding.” That’s not a movement from happy to bleak; it’s the exact opposite.

So Waugh has given us two contradictory messages here. The most overt one is, “This is going to be a very bleak love story, with plenty of reminiscence.” But the secondary, almost hidden one is, “this is a story of growth, and bloom, and hope, and life.”

And, darn it, but that’s exactly what this book is: a sad love story (Ryder + Sebastian, and also Ryder + Julia) but also a very hopeful one (Ryder + God.)

Now, I wouldn’t suggest that writing a sad love story about God is a brilliant way to make sales in the 21st century, but your story is what it is. Foreshadow that. Do it with wit. Do it obliquely. Do it with a sentence. Do it with an image. But do it gently. Don’t break the plant that hasn’t yet put down roots.

Got that? Good. Now execute.

–Forum Auctions is selling two Waugh first editions that might be of interest. A first with dust wrapper of Brideshead Revisited. It is not stated whether this is the Book Club or publisher edition which were issued at the same time; the dust wrapper says Chapman and Hall. The other is a first large paper edition (limited to 50 copies) of a signed copy of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, dedicated to a Miss O’Donnell. The seller offers this comment: “Inscribed to Miss O’Donnell – probably wife of Donat O’Donnell who heavily criticised Waugh’s novel in the July 1957 issue of The Spectator – as an unsuccessful gesture of reconciliation or flattery on Waugh’s part.” These are designated Lots 113 and 114. The auction is scheduled for 25 September at 1pm. Here’s a link for details.

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Mid-September Roundup

Posted on September 14, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–A post on the website UnHerd.com seems to have been inspired by the recent book of Eleanor Doughty on the British aristocracy Heirs and Graces. This has been mentioned in several previous posts. The article is written by Pratinav Anil and is entitled “Britain is a nation of flunkies.” Here is an excerpt:

…The interwar years found the aristos properly on the skids, with huge tracts of land sold off. Brideshead Revisited is in great part a whinge about precisely this. In the postwar period, Manny Shinwell, minister of fuel and power and unreconstructed class warrior, pulled the aristocracy down another peg. He requisitioned Wentworth, that preposterous estate of some 365 rooms where guests were issued confetti to mark their trail back to bed Ă  la Hansel and Gretel, and had it torn open for an opencast coal mine. Rhododendrons and holly trees fell like nine-pins before the ripper shanks…

The full article is available here.

–An article in the “Artillery Row” column of The Critic magazine discusses recent changes in the BBC’s programming policies. This is by Niall Gooch and is entitled “A Lot to Bragg About.” He notes particularly the discontinuance of Melvin Bragg’s long running Radio 4 program In Our Time. The article begins with this:

When Evelyn Waugh was divorcing his first wife Evelyn Gardner in 1929, the name of Sir John Heygate was cited in the court proceedings, Gardner having left Waugh for the young baronet. At the time, Heygate was employed by the BBC, and was required to resign, on the grounds that his involvement in the divorce might damage the reputation of the fledgling Corporation. To most modern people, this incident will seem at best quaint, and at worst morally outrageous. Conceivably they are right.

But the distaste for adultery does reflect a deep and admirable sense of purpose and worthiness that characterised the BBC from its very earliest days. “Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation”, the official motto adopted in 1927, is not a direct quotation from the Bible, but it certainly sounds like one, given its sonorous rhythm and grand idealism (maybe that is why it is so rarely heard nowadays). The idea was that the new technologies of radio — and later television — could be used to spread knowledge, understanding and virtue across Britain and the wider world, unsullied by vulgar commercial considerations. John Reith, the first Director-General, famously disliked the advertising-led free-for-all of interwar American radio…

[P]erhaps the outstanding example of pure public service broadcasting is In Our Time, a fixture of Thursday mornings on Radio 4 for 27 years, in which three academics discuss their subject for forty-five minutes, with Melvyn Bragg on hand to prod, interject and keep them on topic. It was one of the first BBC radio shows to be made available as a podcast — this was very helpful for those of us who usually had somewhere else to be at 9 o’clock on a Thursday morning, and hardly surprising, because it was really a podcast avant la lettre, with its simple format of host plus experts. The subjects covered are self-consciously eclectic; recent instalments have covered Dragons, The Evolution Of Lungs, Moliere, and Pollination. I have a distinct memory, from many years ago, of gradually waking from a deep alcohol-induced sleep to realise that I was listening to a delightful woman from Oxford talk about The Fisher King, a mysterious figure from medieval mythology, and hence that I was catastrophically late for work.

A full text of the article is posted here.

–The latest issue of the journal Foreign Policy has an article by Edward Lucas entitled “The Perils of Irresponsible Reporting of Russia’s War.” Here’s the opening:

Discussions of irresponsible media coverage often lead to the fictional character of Wenlock Jakes. Supposedly the “highest paid journalist of the United States,” this infamous figure features in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel, Scoop, the classic satire of editorial egos and reportorial incompetence. Jakes is hugely influential, despite—or because of—his loose grasp of facts.

Jakes’s misreporting changes the course of history. Having overslept on a train in the Balkans, he gets out in the wrong country. Undaunted by such minor inconveniences, he files a colorful, made-up dispatch, featuring every cliche of his trade: “barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the deserted roadway below his window.”…

—America: The Jesuit Review has an article by Katy Carl who sees coming another  “Revival” of Roman Catholic literature. Here is her identification of three previous examples:

… There have been at least three major waves, and they have tended to travel westward.

The first, which took hold in France, flourished from the early decades of the 20th century through the Second World War and succeeded in giving us major influences such as Mauriac, the Maritains, Bernanos, Bloy, Peguy and Claudel. The second flourished in England in the interwar period—the 1930s and ’40s—and featured writers as different as Caryll Houselander (who published in modest numbers with the confessionally Catholic house Sheed & Ward), Evelyn Waugh (who took the mainstream by storm) and Graham Greene (notorious good-bad boy and self-hating Catholic who loved to push the envelope with readers, whether they were believers or not). The Inklings are no doubt also part of this U.K.-based second wave but are best understood on their own terms, rather than on standard terms of literary convention.

The third wave, which began to rise in the United States around the end of World War II, is the “revival” most American readers have in mind when referring to Catholic literary work. It encompasses the American writers we in the United States tend to have heard the most about—Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy—as well as minor but important figures who are often forgotten, like Caroline Gordon, Betty Wahl, Edwin O’Connor and J. F. Powers. Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, both lapsed Catholics, have an underexplored relationship to this third revival, whose relationship to the mainstream of 20th-century American literature is in turn less well understood than it might be…

The full article is available here.

 

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Early September Roundup

Posted on September 7, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–The online journal American Thinker has posted an article by Lars MĂžller entitled “Evelyn Waugh’s England: A Lament for a Lost World”. Here are the opening paragraphs:

In the mid-twentieth century, the English novelist Evelyn Waugh chronicled, with elegance and melancholy, a world slipping away. His novels, particularly Brideshead Revisited, portray a vision of England rooted in tradition, faith, hierarchy, and cultural refinement — a civilization with the Church at its center, the aristocracy as its stewards, and classical education as its soul.

Today, that England is all but gone. In its place stands a nation that is multicultural, secular (albeit increasingly Islamic), and globalized — a country that has reimagined itself as a bastion of diversity and liberal democracy. For some, this transformation represents progress; for others, it marks a rupture with the spiritual and cultural coherence that once defined the British identity. Waugh’s lament goes beyond changing customs; it is also about a profound civilizational shift — the loss of a unifying narrative, the decline of intellectual and religious sophistication, and the disappearance of belonging rooted in place, faith, and history…

The entire article can be read or listened to at this link. No subscription is required.

–Aaron Bastani has an article in a recent Daily Telegraph in which he considers novelists based on their political inclinations. This in entitled “I’m a Marxist but I mourn the loss of the conservative novelist.” As a Marxist, he first goes through the leftist catalogue, and then he turns to the conservatives. Here’s an excerpt:

… it is conservative writers – absent of a didactic agenda – who feel most at ease in the complicated world of human intention. This became especially clear to me while reading Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. More than simply bringing the Second World War to life, Waugh’s semi-autobiographical tale offers a human perspective with which I was unacquainted.

Guy Crouchback, the story’s protagonist, gradually realises he is a man at odds with the direction of the war, and indeed history. He regards his initial crusading views about Britain’s involvement as naive, and concludes that moral impulses can only be expressed in personal acts of kindness rather than through military conquest. Reading it completely challenged how I understood the period, and the views of at least some who participated in it…

–This Literary Review has posted a  review of Eleanor Doughty’s new book Heirs and Graces that was mentioned previously. This is by Richard Davenport-Hines and is entitled “Brideshead Repurposed.” Here is the opening paragraph:

A hereditary peer, when approached by Eleanor Doughty for an interview during the preparation of this book, accused her of being an agent of the deep state. Far from it. She is a Daily Telegraph journalist, although more eirenic and jocular than many of her colleagues. She has no wish, in writing a history of the British nobility since 1945, to shake foundations or to cause offence. It is evident that she admires the repose that stamps the caste of Vere de Vere. Heirs and Graces is a friendly, forgiving, good-spirited book which celebrates the adaptability, the fortitude, the oddness, the forbearance, the anger and the spite of the coronet class. Every page shows how much she likes other people. The congenial frankness she elicits from her many interviewees is winning. She finds charm in stubborn stupidity, and takes Madame de StaĂ«l’s line tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner when confronted by merciless acquisitiveness or the havoc caused by misused vitality…

—The Times has also reviewed Doughty’s book. This is written by Alwin Turner and entitled “It’s tuff being a toff…”. Here’s an excerpt:

…The country house was part of Britain’s sense of itself. It was, said Evelyn Waugh, “our chief national artistic achievement”, and if few survive as family homes, the image remains embedded  in popular culture, from Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, to Downton Abbey, via Waugh’s own Brideshead Revisited…

–Finally, The Spectator has posted a short list of good but accessible boarding schools. This includes Lancing, Waugh’s alma mater. There is also an aerial photo of the school which gives a good perspective of its surroundings. Here’s a link:

Lancing is a public boarding school for children aged 13 to 18 in West Sussex. Set within the South Downs National Park, it offers an open-air theatre, a state-of-the-art music school, an equestrian centre and even the tallest school chapel in the world. As impressive as its facilities, though, are its alumni: Evelyn Waugh, Sir David Hare and Lord (Stephen) Green to name but a few. Nowadays, many students at the college – where fees start from £12,602 – come from its sister preparatory schools in Hove and Worthing. Also arriving this month is a new headteacher, Dr Scott Crawford, who will replace Dominic Oliver after 11 years. Dr Crawford, who was previously deputy headteacher at Magdalen College School in Oxford, says he is ‘thrilled to join a school that embraces both tradition and modernity’.

It is perhaps no coincidence that nearby on the Google search there appears a link to Duncan McLaren’s description of Waugh’s Lancing school days. This was earlier posted as part of Duncan’s online biography of Waugh and is, as usual, recommended reading. It is available at this link and is also accompanied by excellent photographic support.

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Evelyn Waugh Studies 56.1 (Spring 2025)

Posted on September 4, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest edition of Evelyn Waugh Studies has been distributed and is posted at this link. Here is Jamie Collinson’s description of its contents:

I write to provide you with edition 56.1 of Evelyn Waugh Studies. Appropriately for this back-to-school season, this edition features the winning entry of the John H. Wilson Jr Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest. Nicholas Walz has won the 2024 contest with an original and engaging essay on the theme of eros in Decline and Fall.

The equally engaging writer and classicist Daisy Dunn has become increasingly prominent in recent years. In this edition, Marshall McGraw reviews her latest book, ‘Not Far from Brideshead: Oxford between the Wars.’ In a ‘meticulous reconstruction of a place and a community that was inseparable from world-historic events,’ Dunn takes as her subject three influential Oxford figures, Gilbert Murray, E. R. Dodds, and Maurice Bowra, who ‘inspired some of the most brilliant writers and thinkers of the twentieth century’ – Waugh among them.

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Labour Day (US) Weekend

Posted on August 30, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–Journalist Eleanor Doughty has made a career of writing articles about the British aristocracy. Now she has expanded her writing on the subject into a book entitled Heirs and Graces: A History of the Modern British Aristocracy. This has just been published by Hutchinson Heinemann in the UK and is reviewed in The Spectator and Financial Times.

The Spectator’s review is by Anne de Courcy who says that the book “tells us much of [the aristocracy’s] family history and charts their progress [from the end of WWII] under headings taken from the novels of Evelyn Waugh.” She includes two examples of aristocratic love affairs from one extreme (10th Duke of Beaufort) to the other (11th Duke of Argyll). These are discussed under a heading entitled “Vile Bodies”. Under another heading (“Brideshead Revisited”), she discusses how National Trust stewardship and enterprising estate owners on their own made access to estates more open the public, while improving the incomes and living conditions of the owners. The review concludes with this:

“…As Doughty points out, that ‘aristocratic way has proved remarkably resilient and slow to alter.’ Or as Evelyn Waugh might have put it, decline, certainly–but not fall.”

The full review can be read on PressReader.com.

Henry Mance reviews the book for the Financial Times. His thoughtful, balanced and thorough review concludes with this:

…Doughty draws from a huge number of interviews, rather than, say, observing aristocrats at dinners or parties. (As a woman, she wouldn’t be allowed into White’s, the club of choice, anyway.)

This is not a book that questions the origins of family fortunes, or peers’ role in imperial history, or the environmental ruin of the countryside. Aristocrats and the gentry still own about 30 per cent of England. At least the Duke of Westminster paid for free ice cream in Chester when he got married last year.

Yet Heirs & Graces underlines how well privileged people do in public life. … Only 18 people have disclaimed their peerages since 1963, starting famously with the Labour politician Tony Benn.

Many peers quoted by Doughty claim not to care much about the titles. She wisely takes such claims with a pinch of salt — just as she notes how some aristocrats claim poverty but drive new, very expensive cars. The aristocracy may be antiquated, but it is a side of Britain that refuses to die.

–Evelyn Waugh’s grand-daughter Daisy Waugh has just written another book. This one, like its two most recent predecessors, is a comedy. Its title is Anarchy: Ozias Plume saves the world. Here’s the description from Amazon.com:

A LAUGHING EPIDEMIC IS SWEEPING THE NATION!
Four months ago, terminally gloomy tech billionaire, Ozias Plume, caught a laughing virus that made him see the funny side of life. The virus made him so happy, he felt duty-bound to spread it around the world. He started with little ol’ England
 And now the miserable Brits won’t stop laughing.

It’s a nightmare for the UK authorities.

Fines are imposed. A public inquiry is launched. A state of emergency is declared.


 and STILL the people laugh…

The book is issued by Fisher King Publishing and is available in the US, in paperback only, at the price of $12.08. Here’s a link to Amazon.com.

–The blogger G B H Hornswoggler, posting on his website “Antique Musings”, has written an article about Waugh 1930s travel book Ninety-Two Days. Here are the opening paragraphs:

I doubt there is a travel book with as much of a throw-my-hands-up title as Evelyn Waugh’s Ninety-Two Days. It’s as if he was saying, “Look, I went to a place and spent some time there, and this is the book I wrote about it. Can’t say it any more clearly than that.”

I’m getting the sense that Waugh’s travel books were often, perhaps always aimless and faintly mercenary – his older brother Alec had, I believe, already made a successful career as a travel writer, and maybe it took some time for Evelyn Waugh’s novels to be seen as the magnificent things they are.  Whatever the reason, his travel books can be close to the pure old-fashioned “I am an Englishman, one of the world’s aristocrats and a deeply cultured individual. I will go to This Strange and Foreign Land and tell you about it.”…

His is a link to the full text.

 

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Bank Holiday (UK) Roundup

Posted on August 23, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–Some of those around London may be interested in an event planned for Bank Holiday Monday.  Here’s a description from the Londonist website:

ISLINGTON WALK: The Bring Your Baby guided walks team offers a tour around Islington, aimed at parents and carers with little ones in tow. Begin at Angel station and learn about the area’s history including a picturesque square that was home to George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Vanessa Bell; the spot where the ancient Angel Inn once stood; and the New River and Regent’s Canal tunnel. Finish at Highbury & Islington station, with opportunities to feed and change your baby as needed along the way. 11am-2pm

Orwell’s house is clearly marked with a plaque, but the last time I visited, there was no marker on Waugh’s house. English Heritage is unlikely to erect one there, as they have already put the one on his family house on North End Road (near Golders Green Tube Station). The Orwell plaque in Islington was not an English Heritage project.

–Novelist Philip Hensher has posted a brief essay on the website “UnHerd” reviewing the recent drop in reading which he blames partially on the publishing industry’s “gatekeepers”: Here’s an excerpt:

…Novels have shown a particularly precipitous decline in interest, even though richly enjoyable novels are still being written. The publishing industry has decided, however, that they must pass through the process of evaluation by gatekeepers, who rarely have vulgar pleasure in mind. We’ve now reached the point where winning or being shortlisted for a prize is less of a recommendation than being rudely rejected by one. John Boyne, a very enjoyable novelist, was longlisted this month for the Polari Prize before finding himself on the receiving end of a personal campaign by other, more sanctimonious writers on the list. By the time the prize cancelled itself this week, denouncing Boyne for his private opinions, several of his books had duly climbed up the Irish bestseller charts.

Meanwhile, in the general wasteland of the Booker longlist, a glorious novel inexplicably appeared. Tash Aw’s The South is one of those novels which requires the phone off, a box of chocolates, and five extra copies to press on friends. Anyone with a pulse would respond to this fabulous, explicit account of a passionate, obsessive love affair between teenagers in the heat of a Malaysian summer. Is this book good for you? Probably not. But The Guardian did its best, explaining with prophylactic tediousness that left out all the joyous filth that the novel was set “against a backdrop of tumultuous change and ominous signs of climate crisis”. (The weather, in the book, was hot.)

It’s not just the pleasures of current writing that are assiduously sealed off by such incompetent gatekeepers. How did you come to take pleasure in the inexhaustible, often disgraceful joys of the great classics, of Austen and Dickens and Waugh and Pym and Nabokov? A clever schoolteacher, perhaps, or even a challenging syllabus. But these days, most schoolteachers would, in the words of the man who prosecuted The Well of Loneliness, rather give a bottle of prussic acid to a healthy schoolboy or girl than a copy of Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant. You are going to be asked to develop a pleasure in reading from a book written five years ago, by someone of scant talent for writing but approved views about social justice. Of course you aren’t going to start reading for pleasure…

–Finally, Simon Heffer, writing in the Daily Telegraph, reconsiders the works of the “undersung” novelist Patrick Hamilton. He is “less read now than his contemporaries George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.” After noting his early 1930s trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, Heffer concludes that Hamilton’s most well known work remains Hangover Square (1941). From Heffer’s perspective, however, Hamilton’s “one book that stands out more than others” is his 1947 work The Slaves of Solitude. In the remainder of the article, he explains why. The full article is available on PressReader.com.

–For future reference, the Virginia Quarterly Review has announced that its latest issue (presumably Summer 2025) will include a copy of Waugh’s 1934 work “The Rough Life.” It is not clear from available references to what they may be referring. According to the Waugh bibliography (item 366, p. 66), the VQR in 1934 published a 7-page article by this title that referred to experiences recorded in a report of 1922 debates at the Oxford Union relating to British sovereignty in India (EAR, pp. 12-13).

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Roundup: 3 Novels–2 new and 1 renewed

Posted on August 17, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Spectator reviews a new “campus novel”. This is called Seduction Theory and is written by Emily Adrian. Here is the opening paragraph:

There is a fine tradition of campus novels that stretches from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) through Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) to Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011) and Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It (2024). Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory, her fourth novel for adults, shows the author’s awareness of her predecessors in the genre. One of its main characters even regards Pnin (1957), a campus novel by Vladimir Nabokov, as his comfort book…

–A book from the 1970s written in French has been re-edited and re-translated. It is reviewed in The American Mind, a website sponsored by the Claremont Institute. Here is an excerpt:

The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail is one of the most interesting and controversial novels of the 20th century. Which is why it’s good news that Vauban Books, a small publishing house, is coming out with a new edition, complete with a fresh translation by scholar Ethan Rundell. English-language copies of the book, first published in the U.S. in 1975, have been passed around like samizdat. The Camp of the Saints became popular again in the 2010s, but the rightsholders refused to reprint it until Vauban managed to secure the rights.

The Camp of the Saints depicts mass immigration destroying European civilization. In the novel a gigantic flotilla of boats filled with destitute Indians sets course for France to seek refugee status. After much handwringing, the government allows them to land rather than take the only other option available, which is to massacre them. France—and very quickly all of Europe—turns into a dystopian Third-World slum…

In fact in The Camp of the Saints, nobody looks good. Indeed, the novel’s central topic is not the refugees themselves but the bizarre form of cowardice and self-hate of Europeans that leads them to consent to their own replacement. In this sense, it is like Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, whose portrayal of Africans is decidedly “racist” by our contemporary standards, but whose portrayal of whites—and everybody else—is equally savage and outlandish.

Everything in The Camp of the Saints is over-the-top, not just its unflattering portrayal of refugees. It has a dreamlike quality, complete with baroque imagery, which is integral to the artistic style of the novel. This is what makes it such a powerful and fascinating work of art. To dismiss it as “racist” is not just inaccurate—it is philistinic.

–Two Washington papers have taken note of a novel about the international press corps entitled Vulture. This is by Phoebe Greenwood. The Washington Post said this:

“Innocence is a kind of insanity,” Graham Greene wrote in “The Quiet American,” his classic novel about 1950s Vietnam. The innocent in question is a young CIA agent, freshly baked in the halls of Harvard and ready to impose freedom on the Vietnamese at any cost. “Innocence always calls mutely for protection,” Greene wrote, “when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it.”

Insane innocence runs rampant in “Vulture,” Phoebe Greenwood’s debut novel, about a young British journalist determined to make a name for herself during an eight-day war in Gaza in 2012. Greenwood is herself a journalist who has reported from the region…

The first half of the novel, much of which takes place at a hotel run by a quirky cast of locals doing their best to maintain decency amid the war, is highly reminiscent of “Scoop,” Evelyn Waugh’s canonical satire about foreign journalists in a fictional East African nation. But where Waugh’s novel is a light romp and its main character a lovably clueless buffoon, the second half of “Vulture” goes to much darker places, with Sara sharply descending into physical and mental illness.

The novel is also reviewed in the Washington Examiner. The review is by Malcolm Forbes and opens with this:

In Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s great satire of journalism in general and foreign correspondents in particular, newspaper magnate Lord Copper sends a reporter to the African Republic of Ishmaelia to cover the crisis unfolding there. “We think it a very promising little war,” he declares. “A microcosm, as you might say, of world drama.” Phoebe Greenwood’s debut, Vulture, sets its satirical sights on the same topics. However, its protagonist is not dispatched to report on a “very promising little war” but rather the latest flare-up of hostilities in a grindingly long and seemingly unending conflict…

Scoop also gets a brief mention in The Guardian in an article about news coverage in Gaza:

This debate [over Gaza coverage] reminds me of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, in which the British novelist mercilessly skewered foreign correspondents and sensationalist journalism in the 1930s. Unfortunately, Waugh’s satire still resonates today…

–A Stanford University website called The Book Haven has an article about the family of novelist Boris Pasternak by Cynthia L Haven. This involves an interview of among others the noted Waugh scholar Anne Pasternak Slater. Here’s an excerpt:

I met the Pasternak family during the Pasternak celebration at Stanford last year (I wrote about it here). I was delighted to renew the acquaintance with two of them in Oxford – Ann Pasternak Slater and Catherine Oppenheimer, both nieces of the poet and granddaughters of the artist.  Catherine is an eminent psychiatrist; Ann is professor emeritus of English literature at Oxford (she is currently writing about Evelyn Waugh). Ann is also a formidable critic, and a matchless champion for Pasternak’s work.

 

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Roundup: Articles, a Script and an Interview

Posted on August 10, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–The New York Times has an opinion article in the Sunday edition that may be of interest. The columnist Carlos Lozada explains how he ruthlessly selects  his summer beach reading in a way that really, REALLY assures he will choose the right books. Here’s an excerpt where he considers some books by Evelyn Waugh:

Category No. 3 is the most enjoyable, by definition. It’s the This Book Is Just for Fun books. “The Plot” by Jean Hanff Korelitz has been in this group since it became a thing in 2021, and this might be the year. (I’m a sucker for books about books, and the sequel, titled “The Sequel,” is already out, so enough time has passed to dabble in the original without being too obvious.) Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies” has been on the brink for a while — a British journalist I respect once told me it’s the best Waugh, though I still love “Scoop” and “Decline and Fall” — but I’m not quite feeling it for summer 2025. Someday, for sure.

—The Spectator (2 August 2025) has a review of Ferdinand Mount’s latest novel called The Pentecost Papers. Here are some excerpts from Mia Levitin’s review:

Ferdinand Mount has had an illustrious career, including posts as head of the No. 10 policy unit under Margaret Thatcher, literary and political editor of The Spectator and editor of the TLS. He is a prolific author to boot, with 29 fiction and non-fiction books under his belt. His latest novel, The Pentecost Papers, is an ‘ill-starred odyssey through an incurably slippery world’, he writes, ‘recorded by several hands–most of them unsteady’.

Our first narrator is Dickie Pentecost, a diplomatic correspondent (‘an anachronism,’ he admits, ‘like still keeping a hat-stand in the hall’). … The Pentecost Papers opens with Dickie meeting Timothy ‘Timbo’ Smith on a golf course, where the self-professed healer gives him an impromptu session for back pain. ‘And how do you feel now, Dickie?’ Timbo asks. ‘A bit like after you’ve had a good wank?’ While flustered by the presumptive camaraderie, Dickie indeed feels relaxed (‘drained in a sweet, languorous sort of way’), and begins seeing Timbo for treatment in the Mayfair offices of Ophion Research, the dubious ‘risk management’ company where he works by day. Having developed a friendship of sorts, Timbo asks Dickie to help him track down the grandson of his grandfather’s war buddy, killed in Normandy, in order to return a battered tobacco tin found among his possessions…

While contemporary in its subject matter, the novel offers the good old-fashioned pleasures of prose and plot. Its madcap antics and Waughian wit and wordplay are a joy, and a breath of fresh air in a landscape of contemporary literary fiction that tends to favour either affectlessness or earnestness. Despite Mount having less direct experience with hedge funds than politics, the details of the financial world in The Pentecost Papers, which he credits to multiple sources in the acknowledgements, don’t show it…

–The Spanish paper El Pais has an article by Ignacio Peyro entitled: “An Evelyn Waugh without nostalgia: ‘A Handful of Dust’ is considered the British writer’s most autobiographical novel and its pages collide Arcadian England with modernity.” This is in the Babelia literary section of the paper for 3 August 2025.  It is a review of  the recent translation of the book into Spanish by Carlos Villar Flor, mentioned in previous posts. After summarizing the plot and discussing the characters and their relation to Waugh’s life, the article concludes with this:

…In A Handful of Dust, Waugh offers us a moral-free parable about kindness, weakness, and destiny. Or, to use his own words, “a study of (…) domesticated savages, and how civilized man finds himself defenseless against them.” The novel rests on two constants of Waugh’s genius, perfectly summed up by Carlos Villar Flor and which here achieve particular virtuosity: “Verbal economy compatible with the most exquisite style.” Added to this is the narrator’s detached objectivity, which, with the help of dry humor, lends credibility and complexity to the tragicomic mix. Ultimately, we are faced with a Waugh of great substance, more modern and less nostalgic than he will ever be, but with the sparkle we expect from an easy-to-read English novel. Villar Flor’s translation and prologue portray him as what he is: A Spanish reference in English studies.

Translation is by Google.

–There is an offer on Ebay of a script for the 1960s film version of The Loved One. Here’s a description:

Draft script for the 1965 film, based on the 1948 novel by Evelyn Waugh, legendarily co-written by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood. Deluxe working script belonging to uncredited crew member William Todd Mason, with his name and phone number in manuscript ink on the title page, and some brief penciled annotations on three pages. Laid in is a corner stapled, three-page Staff and Crew list, with two name additions in manuscript red ink on the second page.

Included is a vintage studio still photograph from the film.

An early draft, issued nearly two years prior to the film’s October 1965 release, with substantial differences from the finished film.

The sister film to “Dr. Strangelove,” and in the eyes of many, just as much a masterpiece of exquisitely wrought black humor. Made in the US, but in a dense, British-American style. Ostensibly a satire on the funeral business, in which a young British poet winds up in a Hollywood cemetery as part of an inheritance arrangement—but in reality a satire of Hollywood itself, as well as the Western malaise of the mid 1960s.

Script: Self wrappers, presumably as this draft was issued. Title page present, rubber stamped copy No. 70, dated July 21, 1964, with credits for screenwriters Southern and Isherwood. 158 leaves, mimeograph duplication, with blue revision pages throughout, dated 7-22-64. Pages Fine, wrapper Fine, bound with two gold brads.

Staff and Crew listing: two leaves, slightly worn, with annotations on the second page.

The asking price is $4500.

–The website Flashbak has posted a 2021 interview of Waugh biographer Duncan McLaren. This was conducted before Duncan had  completed the last chapters of his online biography but he was near the end when he was interviewed. It also contains an interesting autobiographical discussion of Duncan’s family life and education and how he became interested in Waugh and other writers.

NOTICE (11 August 2025): A more detailed reference to the review in El Pais was added after the initial post.

 

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Early August Roundup

Posted on August 2, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–Novelist Dan Fesperman in LitHub.com discusses five novels which are set in realistic but imaginary places. One of those is Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop:

…Waugh’s skewering of Fleet Street, published in 1938, is set in the East Africa nation of Ishmaelia, where hordes of British reporters have descended to report on a brewing civil war that may have imperial repercussions. Having arrived to find there is no actual war, the competing scribes then set about creating one on the pages of their newspapers.

A bit dated, but still a hilarious spoof, and its larger lessons seem to be proven true every time the world’s media magnates take an interest in some factional conflict abroad…

–The Times newspaper has a review by John Self of a new novel by Toby Viera entitled The Undrowned. Here are the opening paragraphs:

When a book makes you laugh on the first page — and the last time that happened to me was with Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall— you know you’re in business. Toby Vieira, who was born in India and now lives in Switzerland, may not be a big name, but anyone who read his 2016 debut novel, Marlow’s Landing— a steamy tale of diamond smuggling — will have been looking forward to his follow-up. And it’s even better.

That I laughed on the first page is not representative of the book, which is more of a thriller than a comedy, but it does reflect the sense I had of being putty in the hands of a novelist who knows what he’s doing. I relaxed with relief — then felt tense again as the plot began to crank into gear.

The Undrowned is set in a world like our own, but in it a new virus has begun to spread. It gives you yellow eyes and a fever — and it has an 80 per cent fatality rate. The virus, like the book, begins in an African country referred to only as The Land Of, where our hero Sebastian is working as a journalist…

–Charles Pasternak writing in The Oldie recalls his experience of being vetted for promotion in the postwar British Army. Here’s an excerpt:

…‘When you were at Oxford you were a member of the Anglo-Soviet Society?’

‘No, sir,’ I answered. ‘I was a member of the Oxford Union, but I didn’t participate in debates. I joined the Patten Club [for members of my alma mater, Magdalen College School] and the Spectator Club.’

The latter was an arty-crafty society addressed by eminent speakers. During my time as President, I invited Evelyn Waugh, making clear that we were a non-political, non-sectarian society. ‘I speak only to political, sectarian organisations,’ he replied…

Prospect Magazine has an article entitled Revisiting Brideshead. This is by Henry Oliver. Here are the opening paragraphs:

This is a time of Waugh. By which I mean: the ongoing publication of Evelyn Waugh’s complete works, in a collaboration between the University of Leicester and Oxford University Press—including the 85 per cent of his letters which have never before seen print—is provoking an enjoyable critical reassessment of his writing.

But amid all the discussion, Waugh’s greatest novel—Brideshead Revisited—is being undervalued. The story follows Charles Ryder’s love affair with the Catholic, aristocratic Flyte family. After an intense friendship with the hedonistic aesthete Sebastian, he has an adulterous affair with Julia, Sebastian’s sister, leading to a religious crisis of conscience. The combination of the charms of pre-war Oxford and Charles’s eventual conversion has sustained Waugh’s reputation with the common reader for around 80 years. But the critics aren’t impressed.

Take this essay from the London Review of Books, for example, in which Seamus Perry dismisses Brideshead’s purple prose—even in Waugh’s toned-down later edition, he says, “your main reaction is still: oh puh-lease.” Perry concludes, in a backhanded sort of way, that this is “splendid schmaltz, like the Albert Memorial.”

Or this absorbing reappraisal of Waugh by Will Lloyd for the New Statesman (perhaps the best Waugh essay in recent years). Here, Lloyd largely ignores Brideshead, calling it “quite inexplicable to non-Catholics.” He tells me if he were ranking the novels, it would be close to the bottom.

Jeffrey Manley has even recommended (at the Evelyn Waugh Society website) crossing out the religious passages so that you are left with “a very funny book”. On a different track, though running in the same direction, Alexander Larman has said that there is not “a worse and queasier piece of writing” in Waugh than Brideshead’s sex scene between submissive Julia and possessive Charles.

Several of Waugh’s contemporaries felt similarly. Nancy Mitford told him the general view was, “Too much Catholic stuff”. His friend Christopher Sykes said, “‘Roman tract’ is being hissed in intellectual circles.” There were other complaints. Too many semicolons. Too much about the nobility. Too reactionary. Even Waugh’s brother Alec missed the straightforward jokes of earlier books.

Yet what they’re all missing is what keeps drawing readers in: Waugh’s artistry. In Brideshead, Waugh is the best 20th-century writer of dialogue. His comic monsters, such as Charles’s father, surpass even Jane Austen’s equivalents, such as Aunt Norris. Small moments of grotesque absurdity—the tortoise with the diamonds studded in its shell—are simply unforgettable…

— Centmagazine.co.uk posts an article by Jo Phillips that reconsiders the Bright Young Things of the 1920s and those of later generations that were inspired by the BYPs:

…This set of Bohemian young aristocrats and socialites was based in London during the 1920s. They threw flamboyant parties, went on elaborate treasure hunts through nighttime London, and some drank heavily or used illicit drugs, all of which was enthusiastically covered by tabloid journalists and who elicited outrage from the population at the time.

But what became interesting and also almost set a playbook for future youth subcultures was the creativity that grew from it. From the young minds of writers like Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies, to Trainspotting, the first novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, the sect of the ‘salad days’ has been consistently explored in literature.

Vile Bodies, the second novel by Evelyn Waugh, published in 1930, became a satire of the very bright young things, of which he was part. This elite group in 1920s Mayfair had a paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercising their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade, whether it was promiscuity, dancing, cocktail parties or sports cars.

The book highlights a vivid assortment of characters, among them the struggling writer Adam Fenwick-Symes and the glamorous, aristocratic Nina Blount, who hunt fast and furiously for ever greater sensations and the hedonistic fulfilment of their desires.

Evelyn Waugh’s acidly funny and experimental satire showed a new generation emerging in the years after the First World War, revealing the darkness and vulnerability beneath the glittering surface of the high life. Interestingly, the original title, Bright Young Things, was changed by Waugh because he thought the phrase had become too clichĂ©d…

Later generations are reflected in novels such as Trainspotting and A Clockwork Orange. A sound recording of the article is also available at the same site.

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EWS No. 55.3 Winter 2024-25

Posted on July 28, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

The latest edition of the Society’s journal Evelyn Waugh Studies has been distributed. Here is the message of the Society’s Secretary Jamie Collinson that accompanied the distribution:

The latest Evelyn Waugh Studies – edition 55.3 – is ready for your reading pleasure. It’s a short but very sweet issue, featuring two subjects close to my heart.

The first is a bit of an EWS scoop relating to Waugh’s military service. Last year, we were contacted by the daughter of Major “Harry” Vere Holden White, who had written an as yet unpublished memoir entitled A Memoir of Commando Life. A chapter in the memoir features a suitably (and touchingly) funny Waugh incident. We think you’ll find it of great interest.

Secondly, Jeffrey Manley reviews the latest edition of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: The Loved One, edited by Adrian Poole. This is one of my favourite of Waugh’s novels, not least at it was inspired by Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, very close to where I live in LA. As many of you will know, when Waugh visited LA to discuss a proposed film adaptation of Brideshead, he quickly thwarted the idea by insisting it must be black and white, and instead spent much of his time at Forest Lawn, which fascinated him. He said it was “the only thing in California that is not a copy of something else.”

Jeffrey discusses some fascinating detective work on tracking down a review by Waugh’s on-and-off friend and contemporary, Peter Quennell, which in turn features an appearance by the brilliant, maverick Waugh scholar Duncan McLaren.

In the news section, there’s a link to a very amusing, Waugh-related piece on the comically awful journalist Taylor Lorenz, and to Jonathan Coe’s Guardian article remembering the EWS’ Honorary President, novelist David Lodge.

Thanks as ever to Yuexi Liu and Jonathan Pitcher for editing the issue. We hope you enjoy it!

 

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