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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Roundup: Compilations, Conferences, Croatia and Cover Art

Posted on July 22, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–A profile of author David Pryce-Jones has been posted on the website Onward and Upward. This is written by Jay Nordlinger and is a well-written, concise survey of Pryce-Jones’s life and works. Here’s an excerpt:

…Over the years, I have learned a great deal from David Pryce-Jones. I have learned it through his books and articles, and in person. What subjects has he taught me about?

Well, literature and the arts. History, especially 20th-century history, but the history of other periods, too. The Soviet Union and Communism. Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The Middle East. Etc., etc.

He has written books about Cyril Connolly and Graham Greene. (He is also the editor of a compilation about Evelyn Waugh.) One of his works of history is The Hungarian Revolution. His book about the collapse of the Soviet Union is The War That Never Was. (In America, it was published as “The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire.”)

David was acquainted with the Mitfords, one of whom loved Hitler. That was Unity, of whom we have a biography from David. His book Paris in the Third Reich will likely rivet you, and leave a mark on you. It has inspired poetry and music…

The Waugh compilation was entitled Evelyn Waugh and His World and was published in 1973 in both the UK and US.

–As it turns out, the mention of the Pryce-Jones compilation of Waugh articles coincides with one of the topics covered in a recent conference in Croatia that has been posted on YouTube. This is the article by Freddie Birkenhead entitled “Fiery Particles” about his visit to the mission to which Waugh and Randolph Churchill were attached in wartime Yugoslavia. The recent conference considers Waugh’s report that was entitled “Church and State in Liberated Croatia” and was submitted to the Foreign Office in April 1945.

The conference was called Liberation or Enslavement: Eighty Years After the End of the War in Europe, and was convened 8-9 July 2025 in Zagreb, Croatia. The specific paper discussing Waugh’s report was delivered by Croatian academic Mario Jareb and was entitled “Evelyn Waugh and the Partisans”. The discussion is available on YouTube at this link. Jareb somewhat misleadingly announces that Waugh’s report is now widely available. It was published in 1992 in the September issue of The Salisbury Review but, so far as I know, has not been reprinted in any collection of Waugh’s works. It may be accessible over the internet but I have never tried to access it.

–Harry Mount writing on The Oldie’s website discusses the announcement of a new museum to be devoted to the preservation and display of illustrations. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Harry Mount visits Britain’s first illustration centre. Drawings by Quentin Blake, who founded and funded it, are about to be on show at the Lowry, Salford, and the Bankside Gallery

At last, Britain is to have a gallery devoted to illustration!

Named after Quentin Blake – and generously endowed by him – the gallery will open in 2026. It will be housed in forgotten Georgian and Victorian industrial buildings in a lost corner of Islington.

For 250 years, from the days of Gillray, Rowlandson and Cruikshank till now, we’ve had some of the greatest illustrators and cartoonists. And yet we’ve always treated them as the second-rate cousins of so-called ‘fine artists’.

When Ronald Searle (1920-2011) – the finest British cartoonist of the last century, creator of the immortal Molesworth and the St Trinian’s girls – died, he left his complete works to the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover.

There was no equivalent British place to bequeath his archive to. There is now…

Blake is responsible for the illustrated covers of Waugh’s works in the initial series of Modern Classics published by Penguin. Those would make an admirable display which we can now look forward to.

–The publishers Routledge have announced the reissuance of a 1991 book by William Myers entitled Evelyn Waugh and the Problem of Evil. Here are the details:

Originally published in 1991, this elegantly written book offers new readers a useful approach to the work of Evelyn Waugh and will persuade those familiar with it to look at it afresh. This introduction to Waugh’s novels places them high in the catalogue of great fiction. It claims for them an intellectual coherence, subtlety and seriousness which Waugh’s disconcerting comic gifts and extravagant public and writing persona have tended to put in the shade. In addressing the nature of Waugh’s comic writing William Myers has borrowed George Bataille’s concept of Evil as a convenient way of dealing with the most troubling and exciting aspects of Waugh’s work: its sadism, its childish irresponsibility, its fascination with lunacy and death.

Table of Contents:

1.Vorticists: Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies 2. Barbarians: Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust and Scoop 3. Arcadians: Work Suspended, Put Out More Flags and Brideshead Revisited 4. Exiles: Scott-King’s Modern Europe, the short stories The Loved One, Helena and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold 5. Warriors: Sword of Honour (Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender).

Author:

William Myers retired as Professor of English Literature in 2004, having taught for most of his life in the Universities of Nottingham and Leicester, as well as lecturing in half a dozen universities in the United States,  His interests and published works extend from Milton to Waugh and reflect his interest in theology, philosophy and science as well as in literature.  He was involved in Adult Education throughout his career, and deplores its current decline in the UK.  After his retirement he was ordained as a Permanent Deacon in the Catholic Diocese of Nottingham, but is no longer in active ministry.

Further details are available here.

 

 

 

 

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Satire Gets Some Attention

Posted on July 17, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–Ferdinand Mount is interviewed in a recent edition of The Times newspaper. This is reported by Johanna Thomas-Corr. Here is an excerpt in which Mount discusses his latest novel:

The Pentecost Papers, Mount’s 29th book and 14th novel, is focused on the dark arts of hedge funders. There’s corruption, arson and murder, played out at golf courses and fashion shows, as well as across the burning Brazilian rainforests. It’s navigated by Mount’s baffled narrator and long-term alter ego, Dickie Pentecost, a diplomatic correspondent for a dying British newspaper, who is permanently out of his depth: “These days even having a dip. corr. on your staff is an anachronism, like still keeping a hatstand in the hall.”

The result is a novel that reads as though PG Wodehouse has penetrated the realm of “hedgies”, with a generous side order of Shakespearean shenanigans (concealed identities, people returning from the dead). You can also see the influence of Evelyn Waugh, whose comic novels satirised a modern world of frenetic activity without real purpose. Mount, recalling his own Fleet Street career throughout the Nineties and Noughties, says: “The whole world seems to have gone skewwhiff and become more like lying journalists in The Daily Beast [from Waugh’s novel Scoop]. Like a freak show. It’s incredibly unsettling. Donald Trump changes his position every day, every hour.”

The novel is also reviewed by Zoe Guttenplan in the current issue of Literary Review. Here’s an extract:

…The novel begins – where else – on the golf course. Our narrator, Dickie Pentecost, a diplomatic correspondent for a dying newspaper, is interrupted by the large, red-headed Timothy ‘Timbo’ Smith. When Dickie hits an ‘awkward little shot’, Timbo asks if he is feeling stiff. As it happens, Dickie has indeed been suffering such bad back pain – a tedious topic, he admits, and one his wife has banned at home – that when this relative stranger describes himself as a ‘healer’ and offers to have ‘a little go at it’, Dickie is desperate enough to agree. And it works. ‘How do you feel now, Dickie? A bit like after you’ve had a good wank?’ Timbo asks. Yes, agrees the narrator, ‘that was just what I had thought’. From then, despite a fair bit of eyebrow-raising from his wife, Dickie makes regular appointments with Timbo to temporarily cure his back, visiting him in the Mayfair office of a mysterious organisation where he seems to work as a security specialist, a ‘bottle of vino’ tucked under his arm as payment…

Malcolm Forbes has also reviewed it favorably in the 12 July issue of the Daily Telegraph:

…In Mount’s latest novel, his 13th, Dickie [Pentecost] makes a welcome return. The Pentecost Papers is another sharp satire – this time about the ultra-rich – as well as another exuberant caper. Or as Dickie puts it at the outset, it’s “an ill-starred odyssey through an incurably slippery world, and one recorded by several hands – most of them unsteady”…

–As fate would have it, Princeton University Press has just published a hefty book on the history of literary satire. This is entitled State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature and is written by Dan Sperrin. It is reviewed by Colin Burrow in the current issue of London Review of Books (“Let custards quake”). Here are some excerpts:

…Dan Sperrin focuses on political satire, and his book has a scale and chronological range that borders on the exhausting. It begins in Rome, ventures boldly into Anglo-Saxon England, progresses through satirists such as Walter Map (under Henry II) and Chaucer (under Richard II), through the attempts to reanimate classical verse satire in the late Elizabethan period, on (at length) through the 18th century, right up to Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It…

…The question ‘What is this satire trying to do?’ also implies that authorial intentions are clear, and that so long as you know enough about the day-to-day politics of the Walpole administration you can pin those intentions down and label them like dead butterflies in a display case. Many of the most successful satirists – Evelyn Waugh, even dry old Orwell – had a streak of madness and self-contradiction within them which might lead them to answer the question ‘What are you trying to do?’ with something like ‘I’m trying to beat you all up and beat myself up too.’ Furthermore, asking the same question of satire that one might ask of a political pamphlet aimed at redressing an immediate political wrong radically restricts the parameters within which satire can operate. It makes satire a mode that addresses a particular moment rather than a mode which might have an afterlife, or even change how people see the world in the longer term. You might say that’s not just a recipe for disappointment with satire, but for missing the point…

Most of the book’s 800 pages seem to be devoted to historic periods when satire flourished. The chapter entitled “Modern Satire” (starting after 1900) is attached as a conclusion and is only about 30 pages long. According to the index, it does contain a discussion of Evelyn Waugh which extends over about 5 pages.

–Finally, the British journal Prospect has posted a detailed article about the recent resurrection of the works of Gertrude Trevelyan who published several novels during the 1930s in Britain only to have them disappear entirely after her wartime death in 1941. See previous post. These were not technically satirical works but some flirted with that genre. The closest equivalent writer to her books was (according to the author of the Prospect article, Oliver Soden) the British novelist Henry Green (aka Henry Yorke). Here are some excerpts from Soden’s article:

…The novel for which she should gain a lasting place in literary history is Two Thousand Million Man-Power. Spanning a period from 1919 to 1936, the book is ostensibly about Robert and Catherine, a young couple, chemist and schoolteacher, attempting life together in a comfortable suburban home and then, as unemployment hits, descending into poverty. The telling of this story alone ought to have put the book in the company of Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole or even the first half of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, its exact contemporary (Trevelyan’s book was released, by the same publisher, three months after Orwell’s). But Trevelyan’s ambitions are wider, and the couple’s life, inlaid into a background of news footage, turns and turns within a widening gyre…

The style owes something to the “Aeolus” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses (set in newspaper offices, the text broken up with headlines) and even more to John Dos Passos’s trilogy U.S.A. (1930-36), which includes collages of news clippings and song lyrics. The closest parallel is to Clayhanger by Arnold Bennett (he whom the modernists disdained), in which the life of the eponymous hero suddenly pauses for a page-long intrusion of historical events. But Trevelyan extends the technique into something beyond intermittent bursts of news. Dos Passos’s headlines, through capitalisation and placement, announce themselves as such. Trevelyan’s choric babble is not always from newspapers; she includes fictional creations, other stories, other novels, going on at the same time (“Tom Smith yawning and cursing the alarum in Celestin Road, Brixton, Ted Brown cursing and catching the bus at Peckham Rye, Syd Jones scratching his head in the tube at Uxbridge
”). The novel could so easily have been about Syd Jones, or Tom Smith, or Ted Brown, names of purposefully blanched anonymity…

To read Two Thousand Million Man-Power is to be giddy at the continual overturning and upending of scale, the dilation and contraction of viewpoint, zooming in and out from the specific to the global, through the semi-permeable membrane of semicolon or comma. It is a novel that simultaneously puts a square-inch of life under a microscope and shows the world spinning in space. This bilocation—writing the honeycomb of life and the individual cell at the same time—makes her uniquely able to lay out the plight of the worker bee amid the buzzing colony. For Trevelyan, the world was fast becoming “one huge, senseless machine. Men making it and it making men: little machine-made, swarming men
”. This may be what TS Eliot called “the human engine” that “waits like a taxi throbbing waiting”. But, surprisingly, the neatest literary parallel is an obscure song by NoĂ«l Coward called “City”: “Lonely, one among millions, life’s a sad routine
 living in shadow, part of a machine
 sirens shrieking, progress weaving poor humanity’s pall
”. In Two Thousand Million Man-Power, modern life for the working man, lost amid the screaming hordes, emasculated by technology and industry, is shown and not told, knitted into the book’s technique. It is not a book about the individual versus the world, the regress of the former in the face of the latter’s progress: the prose enacts the dichotomy. The novel is the machine…

The novels vary in quality, her prose is unpolished and readers will be divided as to whether the smudges are strategy or carelessness, her repetitions effectively claustrophobic or merely irritating (Two Thousand Million Man-Power has another of Arnold Bennett’s tics: it hisses with the noise of gas lamps, which are mentioned dozens of times). Some reviewers were unconvinced, finding her work not only aggravating but secondhand, modernism-by-numbers. She made a powerful enemy in the shape of Evelyn Waugh, who dismissed Two Thousand Million Man-Power as “a typical example of sham modernity
 with a succession of futile interpolations
 shop-soiled stunt-writing”. It is hard for a book to recover from a drubbing such as that…

The review by Waugh appeared in the magazine Night and Day (1 July 1937). The complete Prospect article is available on the internet at this link.

–A new satirical novel has recently been issued in the UK. This is entitled Drayton and Mackenzie and written by Alexander Starritt. It is reviewed in the latest issue of The Spectator by Susie Mesure. Here are the opening paragraphs of her review:

Alexander Starritt has form with satire. His 2017 debut The Beast skewered the modern tabloid press, drawing comparisons with Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. For his third novel, Drayton and Mackenzie, he is back at it, mercilessly mocking everything from Oxbridge and management consultants to tech bros and new parents in a story that hinges on whether two unlikely friends can make a success of their tidal energy start-up. It’s more fun that it sounds.

The narrative opens in the early 2000s with James Drayton – someone who gets his kicks by finishing his maths A-level exam in 20 minutes and who finds undergraduate life disappointingly basic. ‘He supposed he’d been naive to think of university as concerned with intellect
 At this level, Oxford was just an elementary course in information-processing, a training school for Britain’s future lawyers, politicians and administrators,’ writes Starritt, using the omniscient voice….

The yang to Drayton’s yin comes in the form of Roland Mackenzie, an Oxford slacker who scrapes a 2:2. They’re at the same college but barely clock each other. Later, when James is the subject of articles and interviews, he will be asked if it’s true that they were both in the same rowing boat. ‘James didn’t notice him at the time.’…

NOTICE (18 July 2025): A newly published example of satirical novels was mentioned in the press after the initial notice was posted. This has been added above.

 

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Roundup: Fogeys and their Habitat

Posted on July 12, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–The religious journal First Things in its current edition (August/September) has a feature length article entitled ‘Waugh Against the Fogeys’. This is written by Jaspreet Singh Boparai. Here are the opening paragraphs:

On June 17, 1953, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote to a friend: “I am now preparing a booklet which I hope (but perhaps it is too much to hope) may cause a paralytic stroke to my old enemy Evelyn Waugh.” The “booklet” in question was a historical study meant to make the Catholic Church look ridiculous. He eventually abandoned the project.

Trevor-Roper loathed Catholics in general but cultivated a special scorn for Waugh, with whom he carried on a feud that began in 1947, when Waugh attacked Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler, and ended only with Waugh’s death in 1966. As late as 1986, Waugh was still on Trevor-Roper’s mind. Trevor-Roper told his protĂ©gĂ© Alasdair Palmer:

‘I forgive him a great deal because of his genuine love of our language. His wild fantasy and black humour are aspects of his genius, as well as of his warped character.’

Yet his overall assessment was far from favorable:

‘He was, I believe, utterly cold-hearted: all his emotions were concentrated (apart from his writing) upon his social snobisme and his Catholicism, which was a variant of it, or rather, perhaps the ideological force behind it. He was a true reactionary—not just a troglodyte . . . but a committed, believing, uncompromising, intellectually consistent reactionary like (say) [Joseph] de Maistre.

He picked a quarrel with me in 1947—wrote me, out of the blue, a very nasty letter, attacked me in The Tablet, and then in other papers. I bit back occasionally, and then he became, as it seemed to me, somewhat paranoid. I heard many stories of his wild, and often intoxicated, denunciations, and since his death his published (and unpublished) letters have given further evidence of his hatred of me. He evidently regarded me as a particularly poisonous serpent who had slid into the garden of Brideshead and was corrupting its innocent Catholic inhabitants; which perhaps, to a certain extent, I was—or, as I would prefer to say, was provoked into being. In the end I tried to make peace with him, but my civil letter received only a curt formal acknowledgement.’

The “nasty letter” was not in fact “out of the blue”: Trevor-Roper admits that it was provoked by “an admittedly injudicious remark by me about Jesuits.” Perhaps he saw in retrospect how it might have been offensive to claim (in The Last Days of Hitler) that Joseph Goebbels learnt his skills as a propagandist as the “prize pupil of a Jesuit seminary,” especially given that Goebbels had not in fact been educated by the Jesuits. But such details were omitted; Trevor-Roper preferred to fixate on Waugh’s alleged vendetta:

‘since his death, I have seen letters from him which attacked me well before that publication, so I no longer know the original cause of his hostility. The general background to it was certainly ideological.’

No evidence has so far been published to corroborate Trevor-Roper’s claim that Waugh was aware of him before the middle of 1947. But he was right to suggest to Palmer that there was an “ideological background” to all this. As Trevor-Roper fancifully portrayed the situation:

‘During the war, and throughout the 1950s, a group of very articulate, socially reactionary Roman Catholics— all, or nearly all, converts—pushed themselves forward and evidently thought that they could be the ideologues of the post-war generation. They established themselves, by patronage and infiltration, in certain institutions (the British Council, the Foreign Office) and they wanted to establish themselves in the universities.’

Perhaps there really was a modest Catholic resurgence in England prior to the Second Vatican Council. But Trevor-Roper overstates it to the point of paranoia…

The article is available at this link but full access may require a subscription or registration. Thanks to our reader Dave Lull for sending a copy.

–There is a podcast discussion of Waugh’s novel Scoop on YouTube which continues in its second episode. This involves Matt Taibbi and and Walter Kirn who may, in the course of the discussion, mention the whereabouts of the first episode.  It continues for about 45 minutes. Here’s a link. 

–The New York Times has an essay by its columnist David Brooks entitled “When Novels Mattered”. As the title suggests, he thinks they don’t matter any more (or at least not as much as they used to). Here are the opening paragraphs:

I’m old enough to remember when novelists were big-time. When I was in college in the 1980s, new novels from Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Alice Walker and others were cultural events. There were reviews and counterreviews and arguments about the reviews.

It’s not just my nostalgia that’s inventing this. In the mid- to late 20th century, literary fiction attracted huge audiences. If you look at the Publishers Weekly list of best-selling novels of 1962, you find works by Katherine Anne Porter, Herman Wouk and J.D. Salinger. The next year you find books by Mary McCarthy and John O’Hara. From a recent Substack essay called “The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction” by Owen Yingling, I learned that E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime” was the best-selling book of 1975, Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” was the best-selling book of 1969, Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” was No. 3 in 1958 and Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” was No. 1.

Today it’s largely Colleen Hoover and fantasy novels and genre fiction. The National Endowment for the Arts has been surveying people for decades, and the number who even claim to read literature has been declining steadily since 1982. Yingling reports that no work of literary fiction has been on the Publishers Weekly yearly top 10 sellers list since 2001. I have no problem with genre and popular books, but where is today’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, George Eliot, Jane Austen or David Foster Wallace?

I’m not saying novels are worse now. (I wouldn’t know how to measure such a thing.) I am saying that literature plays a much smaller role in our national life and that this has a dehumanizing effect on our culture. There used to be a sense, inherited from the Romantic era, that novelists and artists served as consciences of the nation, as sages and prophets, who could stand apart and tell us who we are. As the sociologist C. Wright Mills once put it, “The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely lively things.”…

—History Today has an article by Nicola Wilson about the Book Society that flourished in Britain just before and after WWII. Here are the opening and closing paragraphs:

In October 1929 thousands of members of Britain’s Book Society received a new hardback through the post. Whiteoaks, by an unfamiliar Canadian writer, Mazo de la Roche, was the seventh monthly ‘choice’ of the society, Britain’s first subscription book-of-the-month club, begun in April that same year. The novel confirmed the club’s taste for entertaining page-turners; books that were worth investing time and money in, though not too complex or ‘highbrow’. ‘No selection that the Book Society has made has given me so much pleasure as this one’ wrote the head of the selection committee, bestselling novelist Hugh Walpole, in the Graphic.

For almost 40 years the Book Society served tens of thousands of readers worldwide, choosing nearly 450 titles overall from a variety of publishers (judges assessed writers’ manuscripts pre-publication, with readers receiving the publisher’s first edition). Set up to boost book-buying when Britain was still ‘a nation of book-borrowers’ (according to Freddie Richardson, head librarian of Boots Book-lovers’ Library, which charged an annual fee to borrow new books), the aim was to help readers, support debut authors, and challenge some of the snobbery around who had access to new books. Thirty to 40 per cent of the society’s members lived overseas, many in what were then parts of the British Empire. Book Society collections have been discovered in homes in Canada, Tanzania, and India…

When the club collapsed in 1968 – partly due to a better public library service and the take-off of postwar paperbacks – its archives were lost, and its story forgotten. But the Book Society contributed to the success of many well-known titles, including Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1949), and Thor Heyerdahl’s The Kon-Tiki Expedition (1950).

–The BBC has posted a review of the new book by Seth Alexander ThĂ©voz entitled London Clubland: A Companion for the Curious. Here are some excerpts:

…It all started with coffee. In the second half of the 17th Century, when coffee drinking was first introduced to England, coffee houses were a welcome alternative to taverns and became associated with good conversation. Samuel Pepys wrote in December 1660 of his evening at the “Coffee-house” in Cornhill: “I find much pleasure in it through the diversity of company – and discourse.”

In 1693, an Italian migrant to London, Francesco Bianco (who anglicised his name to Francis White), opened an establishment that served both coffee and hot chocolate; he called it Mrs White’s Chocolate House. Patrons flocked to St James’s Street, not only for the hot beverages, but for the gambling room – the site of illegal, high-stakes card games – tucked away at the back of the premises. White’s is still operating, and is London’s oldest club. Only men are allowed to join. (King Charles counts among its 1500 members; he held his stag night at White’s before his 1981 wedding to Princess Diana.)…

Ian Fleming was a member of Boodle’s, upon which he based Blade’s club in his James Bond books. In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, protagonist Charles Ryder gathers with friends at Bratt’s, most likely inspired by Pratt’s, a small supper club in St James’s founded in 1857, and owned since 1926 by the family of the Duke of Devonshire. In 2023, this most conservative of establishments surprised many by admitting women for the first time…

Waugh was a member of White’s and at least one other club mentioned in the article, the Savile. The full review can be accessed at this link.

–Duncan McLaren has advised us that the “Combe Florey” chapter of his online posting of Waugh articles is now complete. Here’s a link to the index. He doesn’t mention the most recent additions, but I think one of them (Photo Session August 1965) is newly added. It is in any event worth a look and can be found in the index linked above. It is of a piece with the other photo shoots described and identified as such.

 

 

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4th of July (USA) Roundup

Posted on July 4, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–The most interesting item this week is a short essay posted on the literary website Dappled Things by Geoffrey Smagasz. This is called “Orphans of the Storm” and is based on the chapter of that name in Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Probably a thousand articles have been written in praise of Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited—about the expertly-limned characters, about the spot-on dialogue, about the resolution of each character’s story arc. I’m going to heap on the thousandth-and-first accolade by showing the precise way that Waugh handles the rolling of the ocean liner crossing the Atlantic during a storm while Charles pursues and consummates his adulterous relationship with Lady Julia Flyte.

Charles, the narrator, lays it on thick as he gives us his excuses for committing adultery in the chapter, “Orphans of the Storm.” We find out that he’d married; that his wife, with whom he is traveling, had previously committed adultery; that his marriage is loveless; and, by coincidence, that Julia is on board. Soon, he runs into Julia, he looks into her eyes, she’s at the peak of her beauty, and he’s hooked like a trout. Cut to the beginning of the storm…

The full article is worth a read and is available at this link.

—Reason magazine has posted its summer travel issue that includes this:

…Travel is not merely an industry or a leisure activity. It is a human imperative, a manifestation of liberty. It is to claim membership in the great, messy project of humanity. It makes bureaucrats with stamp fetishes nervous, for good reason.

In his memoir Labels, Evelyn Waugh, that most elegant and misanthropic of English travelers, described the strange joy and self-discovery made possible by arriving in a place where nothing makes immediate sense: “I soon found my fellow passengers and their behaviour in the different places we visited a far more absorbing study than the places themselves.” Waugh’s travel writing is peppered with complaints, to be sure—about delays, discomfort, fellow passengers, and the prevalence of garlic—but beneath the surface there’s something else: curiosity, humility, and a recognition that being a stranger can be a deeply moral experience…

The quote is taken from an article by Katherine Mangu-Ward.

–The religious website Aleteia has posted an article about Graham Greene’s 1948 novel The Heart of the Matter. Here’s an excerpt:

…The great Catholic novelist, Evelyn Waugh, went so far as to claim that Scobie, the novel’s sinful protagonist, was a saint. Others disagreed.

“Scobie commits adultery, sacrilege, murder (indirectly), suicide in quick succession,” one correspondent wrote. “In three of these cases he is well aware of what he is doing
. He takes communion in mortal sin because he can’t bear to hurt his wife’s feelings. This isn’t the way a saint behaves.”

This view was echoed in an unfavourable review of the novel by a priest, Father John Murphy. Describing Scobie as “a Catholic with a conscience of the highest sensitivity and insight,” Fr. Murphy then blames Scobie’s “weak will” which had led him “to adultery, sacrilegious Holy Communions, responsibility for a murder” and ultimately to suicide:

“How can you account for the fact that a man commits suicide in order, among other things, to avoid making any more bad Communions? But the answer is obvious: Because he despaired where he should have repented?”

The confusion sown by the novel was not the intention of the novelist himself. In a letter to Evelyn Waugh, Greene insisted that he “did not regard Scobie as a saint, and his offering his damnation up was intended to show how muddled a mind full of good will could become when once ‘off the rails.’”…

–The website Bloomsbury.com has posted an article about the award of this year’s “Pleasure of Reading Prize” to novelist Robert Harris. Here is an excerpt:

…On being chosen as this year’s recipient Harris said, “I keep a quotation on my desk from Evelyn Waugh: “It cannot be said too often or too loudly – that all Art is the art of pleasing.” I don’t think Waugh meant by this that all novels must have happy endings – most of his don’t – but that they should stimulate, engross, entertain and generally engage the reader from beginning to end. That is not an easy task, but it has been my overriding ambition. It is therefore a particular honour to be given this wonderfully-conceived prize, that aims to celebrate the delight of reading, and to join such an impressive list of previous winners.”

The judging panel commented, “Robert Harris is one of Britain’s most deeply and repeatedly engaging novelists, known for his strong storytelling, sharp eye for history and canny take on politics. His breakthrough book, Fatherland, imagined a chillingly plausible world in which Nazi Germany had won the war, and set the tone for a career marked by fiction that has been consistently intelligent and driven by an ever-alert ear for suspense. From the intrigues of Ancient Rome in the Cicero Trilogy to the Dreyfus affair in An Officer and a Spy, Harris has a talent for turning complex historical events into page-turning narratives. His journalism taught him clarity and his political engagement subtlety. Nothing is more enticing than sitting down with a new Robert Harris to hand and opening that first inviting page.”…

–Finally, Larry Barnett, writing in the Sonoma Valley Sun, a free newspaper distributed in Northern California, has an article containing his thoughts on life and death. Here’s an excerpt:

…Life and death are two sides of a coin. At some juncture we still do not fully understand, chemistry becomes biology; lifeless chemicals and minerals become living systems, reversing entropy for a little while. This may be commonplace within the universe, although we’ve yet to discover life anyplace else other than here on Earth.

As Bob Dylan wrote and sang, “he not busy being born is busy dying.” It’s true; life will kill you. This fact underlies the naming of AimĂ©e Thanatogenos in Evelyn Waugh’s book The Loved One; her last name literally means “Born dead.” So it is for us all…

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