Spring Equinox Roundup

Posted on March 22, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Economist has an article about the updating of the “basket of goods” put together by the UK’s Office for National Statistics for the purpose of measuring inflation. Here is an excerpt:

To read the contents list of the basket of goods, updated this week by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), is an intriguing experience. For economists it offers a sober measure of consumer-price inflation. For everyone else it is a births-and-deaths column for British consumerism, announcing the arrival of some objects and acting, for others, as their epitaph.

Thus this week the list noted the arrival of “men’s sliders” and the demise of newspaper advertisements. It has previously recorded the demise of linoleum (in 1980), of corsets (1970) and of oil lamps (1947). Its very name is a relic: that word “basket” sounding like something that might have hung from the arm of a British housewife as she went to the shops in her mackintosh (1947-52) to buy Brussels sprouts (1947-2006). Sometimes, it is an enigma: in the 2000s a “small caged mammal” appeared, unexpectedly, in the ONS’s calculations.

The basket itself, in its modern form, was born in 1947. The political mood was tense. British families, who had paid a high price—in some cases the ultimate one—for the war were angry at the high prices they had to pay for everything else in the peace….

As well as about many other, more unappetising things. The 1947 list, at the height of rationing, shows a nation surviving on Brussels sprouts, margarine and the ominously oblique “compound cooking fat”. This, Evelyn Waugh later wrote, was “a bleak period of present privation” and, he added, even more bleakly, “of soya beans”. Rationed food was“unbelievably dreary”, says Max Hastings, a historian.

It did not fill stomachs but did, oddly, fill books. In the “hungry novels” of wartime and post-war Britain, British novelists with poor diets and rich imaginations allowed their characters to gorge on the foods which they could not. In “Brideshead Revisited” Sebastian Flyte eats strawberries and sips Château Peyraguey beneath a spreading summer elm. It “isn’t a wine you’ve ever tasted,” he says. Given that “Brideshead” was published in 1945, and “table wine” didn’t appear until 1980, this was probably true…

Here’s a link to the full article.

—Liberties, a quarterly journal of culture and politics published in Washington, has in its latest issue a reassessment of Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. This is written by Henry Oliver and entitled “Evelyn Waugh’s Decadent Redemption”. It opens with this:

Brideshead Revisited is one of the great English novels of the twentieth century. It is beloved, but it also provokes antipathy — as it always has. When Evelyn Waugh wrote the novel in 1945 many of his fellow writers reviled it. They, like so many secular contemporary readers, found its Catholicism bizarre, its breathless depiction of the upper classes appalling, and the prose grossly over-stylized. All of this was intentional. Brideshead was supposed to be a  door into a lost world…

The first part describes the book and considers its critical reception. That section concludes with this:

Readers often grumble that the luscious Oxford section which opens Brideshead gives over to a slower, dimmer setting. Such a bait and switch! Such delicious bait! Why did the author, capable of heaping details about pleasures, art,  silk ties, country houses, poetry, and wealth — why did such an author suddenly throw us out of Paradise? Why all this strange religious fervor? Where are the strawberries and champagne? What happened to the madrigals?

Objections are more than aesthetic.Why must Sebastian suffer? Why must Lord Marchmain come home to die in splendour and convert? Why, oh why, must the love stories fail?  So many readers find the ending unbearable. One writer I know cried on the underground the last time he read it.

An excellent reappraisal  which appeared in the New Statesman in 2023 said Brideshead was “quite inexplicable to non-Catholics.” Even Jeffrey Manley of the Evelyn Waugh Society recommends crossing out the religious parts so you are left with a funny novel. All of this is disastrously wrong. Without the operation of divine grace, Brideshead would be merely a sketch, a series of scenes. What makes the novel great is the power of its ending which vibrates with emotion and fervor. And it cannot work without God. We can only appreciate Paradise in our fallen world…

It then proceeds with a description of Waugh’s writing the book and the author’s own assessment after multiple readings over several years. The article is well written and worth reading. It is available at this link.

–Another website called The Homebound Symphony contains a comment on the article discussed above. The comment relates to Waugh’s closing passage where Charles Ryder encounters the “small red flame” emitted by a lamp still burning in the Brideshead chapel at the end of the war (and the story). Here’s an excerpt:

…Oliver says that Waugh’s point here is that “what animates modern civilization is the way the lights burn and the bells ring as they have done throughout Christendom in the one true church.” He goes on to say, “There is only one light left burning at the end of this book of shadows: not the lights of Oxford, not the sparkles of diamonds, not the candlelit beauty of Brideshead house, but the lamp in the chapel.”

What Oliver may not know is that this is a sanctuary lamp: the candle lit next to the tabernacle, that is, the receptacle (usually in a niche in a wall) where the consecrated Host is kept. It is typically, though not always, distinguished from other lights in the church by being placed in a red glass chimney, thus the “small red flame.” …

The point here is that the light that Waugh invokes at the end of Brideshead is not just any old religious candle — any old light in a church, even in a chapel of the One True Church — but the light that marks the presence of the consecrated Host, the bread transformed into the flesh of Christ, “the present immanence of God.” This is why in many churches people do not pass the tabernacle, when the candle it lit to indicate its contents, without bowing. This, we may infer, is what Charles Ryder does that morning in the Brideshead chapel.

–A Lithuanian website notes the translation of another of Waugh’s novels into the language of that Baltic country:

During the Vilnius Book Fair, another book by English writer Evelyn Waugh translated into Lithuanian was presented – his novel “Elena”, which tells the story of the empress Helena, who lived at the turn of the 3rd-4th centuries, and whom the Catholic Church venerates as the saint who discovered the true cross of Christ. His translator Augminas Petronis talks about the work.

As noted in a previous post, at least two of his other novels have been published in Lithuanian translations: Vile Bodies and Brideshead Revisited.  Translation is by Google. Full article is available here.

 

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St Patrick’s Day Roundup

Posted on March 17, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–Ben Lawrence writes in the Daily Telegraph that “The arts are now terrified of God”. Here are the opening paragraphs:

“We don’t do God.” Such was Alastair Campbell’s Rottweiler-like shutdown of journalists asking about the faith of his then-boss Tony Blair. Those words, spoken in 2003, still haunt British politics and culture today. To be fair, Campbell’s intervention has always seemed sensible to me. Bringing one’s personal religious beliefs into an arena of utter tribalism is always going to create a collision course between the personal and the public. But religion and culture have had a more fascinating, if fractious, relationship for centuries. And while the National Gallery’s new show, Siena, proves that there’s still a thirst for the numinous, it also serves to highlight the fact that the arts in contemporary Britain is reluctant to “do God” – which is a seriously bleak state of affairs.

In recent times, most worryingly, there has even been a move to remove religion from works where it has been previously tantamount. The Golden Compass (2007), Warner Bros’s cinematic adaptation of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, was doomed as soon as they took out its ecclesiastical themes; they lost the great Tom Stoppard, the film’s original adapter, in the process. I’ve also heard a rumour that the previously announced BBC TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited was dropped because nobody was sure what to do with the intense Catholicism of the Marchmain family, which is integral to the novel’s power.

How did this happen? The marginalisation of public faith in Britain has a lot to do with it. Fewer than half the population of the United Kingdom now sees themselves as Christian, while Islam, the second largest religion, is only practised by four million Britons, or around six-and-a-half per cent of us. But it isn’t simply that the relevance of religion would appear to be diminishing. The fact is that many people in the arts have become reluctant to engage in anything that’s likely to prove controversial – and religion has always been so…

–Two newspapers have recently posted stories about the gardens at Stancombe Park in Dursley, Glos. The longer and more detailed one is by Marion Mako and appears in Country Life. It begins with a history and description of the gardens and estate and continues with this:

…Stancombe Park was a short stroll from Evelyn Waugh’s home at Piers Court and the author, like Sebastian Flyte, surely rested ‘supine on a sunny seat in the colonnade’ overlooking the fountain, although this one is smaller than the ‘dominating’ Italianate one that Waugh conjured up in Brideshead Revisited. ‘It was a sequestered place, enclosed and embraced in a single, winding valley… [the river] had been dammed here to form three lakes, one no more than a wet slate among the reeds, but the others more spacious, reflecting the clouds and the mighty beeches at their margin. The woods were all of oak and beech, the oak grey and bare, the beech faintly dusted with green by the breaking buds… And lest the eye wander aimlessly a Doric temple stood by the water’s edge.’

Close to the temple are two cottages of warm Cotswold stone. Built in the cottage ornée style and originally housing estate workers, they are suggestive of John Nash’s 1811 Blaise Hamlet in Bristol. Leaving the temple behind, the lakeside path runs under an arbour of Vitis coignetiae to rejoin the labyrinthine network. The upper path leads to a camellia grove, studded with specimens of various shades, including the enormous Camellia japonica ‘Yukimi-guruma’ with its fried egg-like flowers. Hidden beyond are two little cupola-topped huts that likely doubled as changing rooms and as winter protection for the more tender plants. Overhung by a magnificent Clerodendrum trichotomum, their view is of an ornate tiered swan fountain. Perhaps this was the inspiration for Waugh’s fountain, ‘found there a century ago by one of Sebastian’s ancestors; found, purchased, imported, and re-erected in an alien but welcoming climate’…

The article which is accompanied by excellent illustrations can be read at this link.

The other, briefer article appears in The Express and stresses the Doric Temple at the top of the gardens as the central point of interest. This is written by Jessica Knibbs and includes this reference to  Waugh:

…The setting is something out of a fairytale and was said to have inspired author Evelyn Waugh, who wrote in her [sic] novel Brideshead Revisited about a Doric temple which overlooked a lake.

Perhaps the less said about this article, the better. Waugh was briefly employed as a probationary reporter when the paper was known as The Daily Express and despised the then owner Lord Beaverbrook. The illustrations might be worth a look.

—The Guardian has an article based on a new book that discusses the state of higher education in Britain. Here’s the opening:

Don’t treat dons like schoolmasters; treat them as you would the vicar at home,’ Charles Ryder is advised at he arrives at Oxford at the start of Brideshead Revisited. Evelyn Waugh seems in tune with a wider public scepticism towards ‘boffins’.

Indeed, it is almost a source of national pride: a tribute to our practical conservatism. ‘When intellectual or aesthetic matters are regarded as the centre of interest, one is apt to be plagued by the sham intellectual, than whom no more insufferable being walks the earth,’ warned Harold Nicolson.

But a fascinating new history suggests such cultural thuggery is little to worry about. Stefan Collini’s Absent Minds argues that since the days of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his plans for a clerisy – a cadre of public intellectuals – highbrows have been obsessing over their demise. Today’s commentators rue the absence of such great minds as Isaiah Berlin, EP Thompson or Iris Murdoch. But those self-same intellectuals had themselves lamented the loss of the TS Eliots, RH Tawneys and Virginia Woolfs of yesteryear. And so it goes on….

–Finally, the website of The Fleming Foundation, a sort of academic think tank, has announced an upcoming program that

…will be devoted to the late Sam Francis’ favorite novel, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.  We shall probably also take up the first four books of Xenophon’s Anabasis, which Edward Gibbon regarded as the liveliest of historical narratives, the Old Testament books of Job and Tobit and the corresponding Greek play Aeschylus’ Prometheus’ Bound,  and Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman.

The first episode will be broadcast before the end of March.  We shall probably have a surprise guest and we invite our readers to post questions as comments to this announcement.

Further details may become available at this link.

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WSJ at Castle Howard

Posted on March 13, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

The Wall Street Journal carries a story about how the Howard family have over the years renovated Castle Howard. The article is by J S Marcus and the photographs by Joanna Yee. Here’s an excerpt:

…The Lake Sitting Room is one of the Howards’ living spaces that has recently received a freshening up from Remy Renzullo, a 33-year-old American interior decorator, who added 19th-century French table lamps. Changes to other rooms include new French wallpaper ($3,885), and new hand-woven floor coverings ($12,952). A new Italian marble fireplace for the sitting room, based on Vanbrugh drawings, cost around $32,362. The Archbishop’s Bedroom has a canopy bed and rare 19th-century Japanese wallpaper.

Renzullo, who divides his time between the U.S. and Europe, also made changes to the Archbishop’s Bedroom, the family’s primary guest room, which is off limits to the public. Large naval pictures were removed in order to highlight the room’s rare 19th-century Japanese wallpaper. Renzullo also redid the 18th-century canopy bed with new French silk damask coverings. Viewers of “Brideshead Revisited” might remember the room as the place where Lord Marchmain, played by Laurence Olivier, dies.

“Brideshead Revisited,” based on the 1945 novel by English writer Evelyn Waugh, is now indelibly linked with Castle Howard. Waugh visited the castle in the late 1930s, and the Howards believe the property at least partially inspired him to create the fictional, dome-topped Brideshead Castle. Jeffrey Manley, an American author affiliated with the Evelyn Waugh Society, said most of the details about Brideshead Castle were based on other sources, but that the conspicuous dome likely draws on Castle Howard. Castle Howard’s Anglican chapel, created in the 1870s, was used in the television series ‘Brideshead Revisited.’

Key locations in the series remain integrated into Howard family life. Nicholas and Victoria [Howard] were married in the castle’s chapel, a monument to the Victorian-era Arts and Crafts movement that appeared in “Brideshead Revisited.” The Howards generally attend public services there at Easter and a few other times a year.

Though the East Wing is their base, other areas of the castle are also reserved for the family, including the New Library, which Nicholas uses as his office. The 1940 fire destroyed the space where the New Library is now located. Nicholas’ father, George Howard, used the proceeds from the filming of “Brideshead Revisited” to create and furnish the new room…

The reference to the chapel at Castle Howard illustrates how Waugh’s use of other structures to describe certain elements in the story created issues for the film-makers. As was explained to me by the late Derek Granger (who produced the Granada TV series), there were Brideshead scenes in the chapel that were filmed at Castle Howard. But in the novel, those scenes took place in a chapel as described by Waugh that was located in Madresfield Court. The Castle Howard chapel was heavily Victorian (see illustration in WSJ article) while that at Madresfield was art nouveau. Here’s how Waugh described the chapel in the novel:

The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and redecorated in the arts-and-crafts stye of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler- roses, flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in armour, covered the walls in an intricate pattern of clear, bright colours. There was a triptych of pale oak, carved so as to give it the peculiar property of seeming to have been moulded in plasticine. The sanctuary lamp and all the metal furniture were of bronze, hand-beaten to the patina of a pock-marked skin; the altar steps had a carpet of grass-green, strewn with white and gold daisies. (May 1945 ed., pp. 35-36)

Granger explained that several features of the Castle Howard chapel had to be hidden or disguised to assure that it was consistent with Waugh’s fictional description. Evelyn Waugh Studies 50.3, Winter 2019, pp. 8-10.

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Dame Edna’s Book Sale

Posted on March 11, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Mail has reported the upcoming auction sale of the book collection of the late comedian Barry Humphries (aka Dame Edna Everage). The most interesting item (Lot 235) among the three lots offered relating to Evelyn Waugh is this collection of four large paper reprint volumes of his early work:

Decline and Fall [&] Viles Bodies [&] A Handful of Dust [&] Black Mischief, together 4 vol., each number 3 of 12 large-paper copies signed and numbered by the author, contemporary blue morocco, spines a little darkened, t.e.g., others uncut, Chapman and Hall, 1937; and a copy of the Glen Horowitz catalogue for the Library of Michael M. Thomas, housed in calf-backed drop-back box to almost match the set, large 8vo (5)

⁂ A superb set of this rare limited edition, likely the only such set to exist.

Waugh requested this series to be printed in conjunction with the third, reset, trade editions. Most copies were presented individually to close friends and family, however this set was presented, in its entirety, to Thomas Balston, director of the publishers Duckworth and Co. who had given the young Evelyn his first break in the literary world, when he gave him a £50 advance for his biography of Rossetti. [Emphasis supplied]

Also for sale is a presentation copy of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (Lot 236):

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, first edition, one of c.50 large-paper copies, signed presentation inscription from the author to “Andrew & Debo [Cavendish] with love from Evelyn. July 19. 1957” to front free endpaper, bookplate of Deborah Devonshire to front pastedown, original red cloth, slight fading to spine, spine tips a trifle bumped, large 8vo, 1957.

⁂ One of an unspecified number of large-paper copies that Waugh kept for private distribution. Andrew and Deborah Cavendish, later the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, were friends and drinking companions of Waugh’s. Andrew Cavendish was a member Waugh’s gentlemen’s club, White’s . [Emphasis supplied.]

Deborah Cavendish may be better known to Waugh’s readers under her maiden name of Deborah Mitford, sister of the more famous Nancy.

For more information about these and other bookish items of the Barry Humphries estate here is a link to the catalogue. The sale is scheduled for 26 March in London at 1:00pm. I believe that internet participation is possible.

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Daylight Savings Time (US) Roundup

Posted on March 10, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley
–The New York Review of Books has posted a review by Martin Filler entitled “Build Britannia.” This is about a book entitled Interwar British Architecture, 1919-1939 by Gavin Stamp. Here’s an excerpt:
…A visceral distrust of European Modernism–emblematic of British xenophobia in general–is captured in Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel Decline and Fall (1928), which revolves around the destruction of an unrestored sixteenth-century Hampshire country house called King’s Thursday, deemed “the finest piece of domestic Tudor in England.” At its new owner’s behest, this fictive landmark is torn down and replaced by a soulless International Style house designed by Professor Otto Silenus, a German Modernist architect transparently based on Walter Gropius, the chilly and officious founder of the Bauhaus. Silenus complies with the patron’s vague request for “something clean and square,” but before it is completed he delivers a cartoonish screed that echoes Waugh’s deep-seated antipathy to the new:
“The problem of architecture as I see it,” he told a journalist who had come to report on the progress of his surprising creation of ferroconcrete and aluminium, is the problem of all art–the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because it is built to house machines, not men. I do not think it is possible for domestic architecture to be beautiful, but I am doing my best. All ill comes from man,” he said gloomily; “please tell your readers that. Man is never beautiful; he is never happy except when he becomes the channel  for the distribution of mechanical forces.”

–From The Times comes an article by Janice Turner entitled: “Spontaneity succumbed to Covid, like so much else.” Here is an excerpt:

Late for a train — yes, because I hadn’t “pre-booked” — I had to sprint across the King’s Cross concourse. “Where do I change for Hull?” I gasped, and the train steward’s accent, warm and familiar, instantly calmed me down. “Doncaster, love.”

I’ve passed through my old home town en route to York since my mother died in 2022, but not set foot there. No reason. No one left to visit. And in the 20 minutes at Doncaster station until my connection, it felt very wrong not to be rushing up the steps to find a taxi, bracing myself for a day at the care home. Platform announcements pricked my heart: Scarborough (where my parents were happiest), Wakefield (my godmother’s home), South Elmsall (the run-down pit town where all my family lived).

Hull is not Doncaster: Londoners might not discern a different accent but I still can. On the way back, another half-hour change at Doncaster, I felt what Evelyn Waugh described (writing of cradle Catholicism) as “a twitch upon the thread”. I need to go north.

–In an earlier edition, The Times carried a story by James Marriott about Donald Trump’s foreign policy negotiating skills (or lack thereof). Here’s the conclusion:

…Of course the answer to cynicism is not naivety. How often is the serious study of history an exercise in discovering the terrible smallness of great men? US foreign policy in South America and the Middle East has often made a mockery of high-sounding phrases: has any war in recent history been heralded with more jubilant hootings over its “moral mission” than our tawdry and tragic outing in Iraq? America’s critics are not wrong to remind us that it has often acted disgracefully. But I am reminded of the expostulation directed by an outraged lady to the writer Evelyn Waugh: “How can you behave so badly — and you a Catholic!” To which Waugh replied: “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic.”

Even sceptics of the West’s claims to moral superiority should accept that a more idealistic political culture offered statesmen with their eyes on the history books an important inducement to better behaviour. It is to that fading culture of idealism that we owe our foreign aid programme and billionaires like Bill Gates who spend their money eradicating malaria rather than buying political influence. Anybody listening to Europe’s leaders over the weekend knows that high-flown idealism can risk sounding implausible. But in these dark times, we all need it. Citizens no less than politicians.

–The Diario de Sevilla has an article about a review by Ignacio Peyró of a new biography of Spanish writer Julio Iglesias, entitled The Spaniard Who Fell in Love with the World. It opens with this (translation by Google):

There have been many biographies as a genre, with weight and scope. Academic and thoughtful. Literary but widely read and popular (think of Stefan Zweig’s Antoinette or Magellan). There have been canonical ones, knowing that all roads lead to Rome ( Suetonius’s Parallel Lives or Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars ). There are also hybrid ones, by author, like Emmanuele Carrère’s Limonov (you can now see the eponymous film about the unclassifiable Russian poet and quarrelsome man made by Kirill Serebrennikov). And there is Evelyn Waugh’s about the Catholic and martyr Edmund Campion, one of the favourites, precisely, of Ignacio Peyró (Madrid, 1980)….

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Roundup: Waugh and Merton

Posted on March 1, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Tablet has published a thoughtful article by Canadian author Mary Frances Coady about the relationship between Catholic writers Evelyn Waugh and Thomas Merton. This is entitled “The Odd Couple”. Here are some excerpts:

In the early summer of 1948, Evelyn Waugh received the galley proofs of an autobiography written by an unknown American Trappist monk. The title was The Seven Storey Mountain. The editor who sent the proofs, Robert Giroux, of the New York publishing firm Harcourt Brace, had felt the need for a big-name endorsement in the shaky hope that the book wouldn’t lose money. He had not expected Waugh to answer.

Waugh’s response was swift, and Giroux placed it on the front cover of the book’s first edition: “I regard this as a book which may well prove to be of permanent interest in the history of religious experience.” … Almost immediately Waugh set about editing the text for a British readership. An entry of 28 August 1948 in his journal is the sole reference to this work: “Tom Burns gave me [the] enthralling task of cutting the redundancies and solecisms out of Tom Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain. This took a week and has resulted in what should be a fine thin volume.”…

Waugh’s editing work on The Seven Storey Mountain consisted of efforts to make the narrative flow: it was the story of Merton’s life from lost and angry youth to Trappist monk that had caught his interest, and he excised words and passages that slowed the story down….The Seven Storey Mountain, with Waugh’s editing, was published in Britain in 1949 by Hollis and Carter under a new title: Elected Silence…

The long-distance friendship between the two men did not last. Waugh’s interest in American Catholic monasteries seems to have waned almost as soon as it began. Although as he was about to sail back to England, Waugh told a reporter that the thing he liked best in America was Gethsemani Abbey, his stay there had lasted less than 24 hours. Their correspondence lasted for a few more years, but there is no indication that Waugh had any desire to return to Gethsemani or that he had any further interest in Merton or his books. Elected Silence, his labour of love on Merton’s behalf, published 75 years ago, has long been out of print, and The Seven Storey Mountain, with all its imperfections, is what people want to read.

A complete copy of the article is available online at The Tablet’s website. Mary Frances Coady is a Canadian author and editor. Her most recent book is Caryll Houselander: A Biography (Orbis Books). The article in The Tablet is probably based on Coady’s 2015 book Merton & Waugh: A Monk, A Crusty Old Man & The Seven Storey Mountain (Paraclete Press). That is available here. Waugh’s edition of the book (Elected Silence) is out of print but still available in the second-hand book market where it sells at a premium price starting at $50. See this link.

—The Spectator has an article by Robin Ashenden about the books of Hungarian-born writer George Mikes. These are known for their sardonic humor and are mostly entitled How to be a ….., the best known being How to be an Alien. After discussing several of Mikes’s books, the article concludes with this:

…[Mikes] went on to tell a story from his childhood, when a friend, Tibor, had called him out for making others the butt of his savage jokes. ‘He said that one’s spiritual powers were given one to protect the weak against the unjust tyrant… making a fool of harmless and defenceless people was a worse crime than stealing.’ As a man, Mikes said, he had felt gratitude to Tibor for a long time for showing him the error of his ways. It was only when he became a professional humourist that he realised the gratitude was perhaps misplaced.

Tibor’s ‘nobility of soul,’ Mikes wrote, ‘is the cause of my pending downfall; it is [the] more or less general acceptance of his mentality that has killed Humour… In many great practitioners – from Swift through W. S. Gilbert to Evelyn Waugh – a strong streak of cruelty is noticeable and, for weaker souls like myself, disturbing.’ But, he added, ‘to deprive humour of its streak of cruelty is like depriving the elephant of its trunk, like depriving water of its wetness. It is like putting a meek, old cow, kindly disposed to the world and to all toreros, in the bullring… The ensuing spectacle is pleasanter, less bloody and less hair-raising than those provided by more spirited animals, but it is not a bullfight. And it does not quite satisfy the crowd…’

Those who make the case for woke comedy, who rail against punching down, or who work in publishing houses as sensitivity readers – that dismal non-job devoted, at its worst, to casting its own patina of mediocrity over the individual writer’s voice – should sit up here and pay attention. So should we all. It seems that in 2025, even from beyond the grave, George Mikes – that most astute and generous Boswell to the British – has something important to tell us about who we are.

The full article can be read at this link.

–A brief article about the career of Somerset Maugham appears in Chronicle: A Magazine of American Culture. This is by Taki Theodoracopulas. Here is an excerpt:

…Maugham had married and was grandfather to two grandchildren by his daughter Liza (one of them, Camilla, Countess Chandon, is still a great beauty and a friend of mine). Despite that, the master writer openly lived with two men who were his secretaries. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain until 1967, two years before Maugham’s death, but he didn’t bother to hide. Fellow writers in the closet, like Evelyn Waugh, were obviously jealous because Maugham was highborn and did not have to put on an upper-class accent, hide his sexuality, or live in grubby digs—everything he did was first class.

Maugham is almost unknown today, something that doesn’t surprise me. Artistic merit nowadays is not matched with success, while fame and mediocrity go hand-in-hand. Back in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, the Bloomsbury Group literary elite predictably denigrated Maugham’s work, while themselves putting out unreadable experimental crap. But novels like Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale, The Moon and Sixpence, Mr. Know-All, The Razor’s Edge, and short stories like “Rain” are superb, psychologically deep, and imaginative, as well as technically superior and precise.

I can’t say where Taki got the impression that Waugh was jealous of Maugham’s open homosexuality. His only collected review of a Maugham novel (Christmas Holiday, 1939) treats it as a work of genius. I recall that Maugham and his wife were separated and that he afterwards lived openly with his male lovers, but outside of England (mostly in the South of France) because of English laws. Waugh’s best known comment on Maugham’s homosexuality comes from a 1952 letter to Harold Acton. This was about Waugh’s brief visit to Maugham at Cap Ferat: “I…made a great gaffe. The first evening he asked me what some one was like and I said ‘A pansy with a stammer.’ All the Picassos on the wall blanched” (Letters 371-72). Maugham was well known to have had a serious speech defect.

 

 

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Washington’s Birthday Roundup

Posted on February 22, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–D J Taylor has written a thoughtful obituary of David Lodge in the latest issue of the journal New Criterion. This is based on his review of Lodge’s life as written in the three-volume autobiography published in Lodge’s final years. Taylor focusses primarily on the first volume, Quite a Good Time to be Born. The obituary/review concludes with this:

…Lodge the Catholic novelist is a very different proposition to such august ornaments of the trade as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, less interested in salvation and redemption, the Damascene conversion, and the deathbed repentance as in the sheer practical difficulty of squaring “faith” with the demands and temptations of the zeitgeist. Lodge’s characters, consequently, are not doomed (or exalted) ex-ceptionalists but ordinary people trying to get by, nervously monitoring their progress through a landscape that simultaneously excites them and worries them by virtue of the threat it poses to the things they hold dear.

As for Lodge’s own part in this, Quite a Good Time to Be Born, again, harbors one or two earnest identifications and records doggedly set straight. There is a way in which these calibrations of art and the reality on which the art is based would be better left alone. The characters exist quite happily (or not) on their own terms. Best leave them to it. But all this, you realize, is a matter of vital importance to Lodge, the kind of person he was or imagined himself to be, and the professional-cum-creative journey he found himself on. In the week after his death, a caricature of him appeared on the cover of the British Catholic weekly The Tablet, for which he had written for many years, above the caption “How Far Did He Go?” The answer, you suspect, is one hell of a way.

–In an article appearing in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Martin Filler discusses the recent wild fires in Los Angeles. He opens  with a review of the 1971 book about Los Angeles architecture by British author Rayner Banham. Here’s an excerpt from near the beginning:

…A working-class Brit who lived through the Blitz, Banham cherished an optimistic belief that modernism held the answers to perfecting the built environment, if not human nature itself. He also had a romantic streak, and like many of his countrymen (though not Evelyn Waugh, the Jonathan Swift of Forest Lawn) he saw Southern California as a sparkling sybaritic wonderland antithetical to drab, inhibited Britain. The cover image for the first edition of his book was his younger compatriot David Hockney’s painting A Bigger Splash (1967), which depicts a turquoise swimming pool in front of a flat-roofed midcentury modern house and two tall, skinny palms against a cloudless azure sky, rendered in the flat sun-blasted tonalities of LA’s endless summer.

–An article about Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia in the 1930s (the subject of two books by Evelyn Waugh–Scoop and Waugh in Abyssinia) has been posted by the website borkena.com (presumably located in Ethiopia). The article is written by Mengistu Asfaw and entitled “Graziani’s Tyrannical Rule 1936-37”.  Here is an excerpt:

The Italians who had a mere nominal control in the face of the courageous and determined Ethiopian Patriot boldly claimed in Europe that the “war in Abyssinia” is completely over. Whereas, in reality such claims were a fiasco. Opposing such claims of the Italians, the famous English writer Evelyn Waugh in his eye-witness account explained the situation as follows: “the Italians are starving, the soldiers live on a piece of bread a day. Nothing can be bought in the shops. No one will accept the Italian money (lira). The Abyssinians are encamped all around the town. The Italians hold Addis Ababa, the railway line and the road to Makale- beyond that nothing. No one can go a hundred yards outside the town (Addis Ababa). Ethiopians are fighting every day in the center of the town.”

Waugh’s account apparently is quoted from his war reportage book Waugh in Abyssinia.

—The Evening Standard has a preview of the new BBC dramatic series entitled “Dope Girls” which starts tonight on BBC One. Here is the opening:

According to the BBC, the series is inspired by “a forgotten time in history” – a period directly after the end of World War One, when men returned to Britain from the battlefields to find that the women they left behind had found a new sense of empowerment and power. Suddenly, women wanted the vote (shocking), and they wanted to work in institutions like the police rather than the kitchen. Faced with a sudden loss of manpower after the horrendous losses of the First World War, the men started, reluctantly, to cede ground.

This applied to nightlife, too. From 1914 to 1918, around 150 illegal nightclubs opened in Soho, and for the women at the time, London was their playground – whether they worked as chorus girls or were members of gangs shaping the city’s hedonistic nightlife scene. [According to the BBC], “Dope Girls depicts in visceral delicious detail the birth of the modern nightlife industry guided and gilded by hard-fought female endeavour” …

As noted in previous posts, this series has a link to a character in an Evelyn Waugh novel. This was Ma Mayfield in Brideshead  Revisited who was based on Kate Meyrick owner of several night clubs in the interwar period:

…Prostitution was … rife inside her clubs: the girls who worked there were called Meyrick’s Merry Maids, and in fact actor David Niven wrote in his 1971 autobiography that he lost his virginity at age 14 to one of them, called Nessie.

She achieved such a level of notoriety that she even caught the eye of Evelyn Waugh, who apparently used her as the inspiration for his character Ma Mayfield – a nightclub owner – in his 1945 book, Brideshead Revisited.

A fixture of the press, her children eventually married into aristocracy and ran her nightclubs when she worked in Paris or served her five prison sentences. Meyrick died age 57 in 1933 from influenza (London’s clubs and theatres dimmed their lights on the day of her funeral as a sign of respect), but her legacy helped shape clubbing culture in the UK for decades to come.

While not mentioned, it sounds as if there will be elements in the series that may resemble scenes and characters from Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies written at the time the drama is set. The first episode airs tonight in the UK on BBC One and BBC iPlayer at 915 pm and will no doubt appear in due course in other countries.

 

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Valentine’s Day Roundup

Posted on February 14, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the New York Times Book Review has posted this notice in its “Read Like the Wind” column. It is written by Book Review editor Joumana Khatib:

The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy, by Evelyn Waugh

You probably know Waugh for his novel “Brideshead Revisited,” or if you’re journalism-adjacent you’ve probably read “Scoop,” or if you really have excellent taste you might cherish “Vile Bodies” as much as I do.

“The Loved One” isn’t as well known, but this novella is quintessentially Waugh: outrageously funny, a satire that arrives like a javelin hurled from left field. It is also very, very weird.

The story follows a community of fairly ineffectual British expats in Los Angeles, and centers on a love triangle involving a funeral home aesthetician, her mortician boss and a rival embalmer–of animals.

I’m as skittish as the next maladjusted mortal about death, corpses, embalming fluids, coffins. And yet! I was howling on every other page. The premise is utterly absurd, sure, and Waugh packs a lot in: a lovelorn man caller Mr. Joyboy, a pair of newspaper reporters writing a pseudonymous advice column, a mad-cap cover-up. (The 1965 film version–which, however improbably, features Liberace–deserves a mention in the DSM.)

But it’s the dialogue that sends the story into the extreme. Take this, as a sample:

“An open casket is all right for dogs and cats,” the animal embalmer (who is also a hack poet) explains to his love interest; but parrots “look absurd with the head on a pillow…Who asked you to the funeral anyway? Were you acquainted with the late parrot?”

God, I’m laughing just retyping that.

READ IF YOU LIKE: Spy magazine, estate sales, “Fawlty Towers.” [or, she might have added, “Monty Python” in which a “late parrot” also prominently figured.]

AVAILABLE FROM: A good library or used-book store, or online at Project Gutenberg Canada (where the book is in the public domain).

–Craig Brown writing in the Daily Mail notes that P G Wodehouse died on Valentine’s Day 50 years ago. He goes on to offer the following:

…One of his greatest champions, Evelyn Waugh, argued in 1961 that ‘Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale.  ‘He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.’

Waugh also said Wodehouse was a master of his craft because he could produce ‘on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to the page’. And it is these wonderful similes, so exact yet so ludicrous, that ensure his comedy will never stale.

Brown concludes with a list of 15 of his own favorite P G Wodehouse similes. Here are two of the best from Brown’s list:

  1. Unlike the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.
  2. The shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French. 

The entire article and remainder of the similes can be read at this link.

–Mark McGinness also notes the Wodehousian connection to Valentine’s Day. He writes in The Spectator:

Pelham Grenville (PG – or Plum) Wodehouse breathed his last on Valentine’s Day fifty years ago. As Evelyn Waugh saw it, Wodehouse inhabited a world as timeless as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Alice in Wonderland. Wodehouse himself said it was as though he was forever in his last year at school. It was, Waugh said, ‘as if the Fall of Man had never happened’….

He reserved his wit and conversation for the page. When an uncharacteristically starry-eyed Waugh met Wodehouse for the first time, he was disappointed to find their exchanges did not get beyond the inequities of income tax. And when Plum was invited to join the Round Table gang at the Algonquin hotel in New York, he complained, ‘All those three-hour lunches. When did these slackers ever get any work done?’…

The full article is posted in this week’s Spectator.

–The Daily Telegraph has an article by Jake Kerridge about US novelist Robert Plunket whose 1983 satirical novel My Search for Warren Harding is being reprinted in the UK as a Penguin Modern Classic. Here’s an excerpt:

…Having moved to Sarasota, Florida, and found that trailer park life suited him, Plunket spent many years working for Sarasota Magazine as a gossip columnist – “Mr Chatterbox”, a sobriquet he borrowed from the gossip writer in Vile Bodies by his hero Evelyn Waugh – and became a leading figure in local society. “I was cultivated by the local politicians because they all wanted to see their names in print. And of course every third-rate celebrity with something to sell ended up in Sarasota so I interviewed them all – Pia Zadora, Eva Gabor.”

He covered George W Bush’s trip to Sarasota in September 2001, and witnessed the then-president being told about the Twin Towers attacks while reading to the children at an elementary school. “I can remember his face the moment he figured out what it meant. And then there was just chaos.” And naturally he was on the spot when Paul Reubens, aka the wholesome kids’ comedian Pee-wee Herman, was arrested for indecent exposure at a Sarasota adult cinema: “It was owned by a friend of mine, in fact I helped him programme all the movies.”…

–The Daily Telegraph has also published this letter from a reader relating to a story about Ofsted’s school rating system:

SIR–As a retired teacher of 35 years’ experience, may I recommend to Ofsted the classification of schools described in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall?

“‘We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate school, Good School, and School. Frankly,” said Mr Levy, ‘School is pretty bad.'”

What more need be said?

Max Sawyer

Stamford, Lincolnshire

–Finally, the Hudson Review has posted a long essay by Brooke Allen in which she discusses several notable contributions to literary scholarship that have appeared in the 75+ years of its existence. This one is of particular interest to our readers:

…William H. Pritchard is one of the best literary critics of his time, and it is The Hudson Review’s good fortune that more than 170 of his articles have graced the pages of the magazine over the course of nearly five decades. In “Total Waugh” (1993), his review of Martin Stannard’s two-volume biography of the novelist Evelyn Waugh, Pritchard was among the first to be bold enough to suggest that Waugh, a humorous writer not taken too seriously by the literary establishment of his own day (he was ignored by high cultural institutions of the time like Leavis’ Scrutiny and Eliot’s Criterion), might just turn out to have been the best English novelist of the twentieth century. Thirty years later this opinion has become quite widespread. In his treatment of Waugh, and of Stannard, an exemplary biographer, Pritchard brings into play his characteristically elegant prose and his clear humanistic values. “The premiere English novelist of [the twentieth] century?” he asks. “I can’t think of any, including D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, who is more repaying.” I can’t either.

The entire essay entitled “Classic Articles Revisited” can be read here.

 

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Evelyn Waugh Studies 55.2 (Autumn 2024)

Posted on February 13, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

The Society is pleased to post the latest edition of its journal Evelyn Waugh Studies. This is No. 55.2 (Autumn 2024). The contents are described by the Society’s Secretary Jamie Collinson as follows:

With Evelyn Waugh Studies No. 55.2,  Jonathan Pitcher and Yuexi Liu have served us up a smorgasbord of Waviana, with an enjoyably grammarian theme. As someone who recently had to consult his younger sister on the usage of ‘that’ or ‘which,’ I thoroughly enjoyed Hartley Moorhouse’s Evelyn Waugh: Which-Hunter Manqué, and was relieved that even Waugh didn’t always get this right. The essay features cameos from Graham Green, George Orwell and our old friend Randolph Churchill – including his unforgettable exclamation on encountering the bible. While we’re on the subject of Greene, I was struck by a grammatical error in the first line of his autobiography, A Sort of Life: ‘…it may contain less errors of fact…’

Jeffrey Manley has been busy on the reviewing front. He considers a book published around last year’s exhibition of Rex Whistler paintings in Salisbury: Rex Whistler: The Artists and His Patrons, by Nikki Frater. This exhibition was timely, not least as Whistler became a victim of the absurdities of cancel culture when his mural at the Tate Gallery was hidden from public view. Manley examines how Whistler’s world intersected with Waugh’s, and more importantly the latter’s ambivalent and creatively fruitful attitude towards victory in World War II.

Manley has also reviewed Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath, by Jeffrey Meyers, ‘probably the most prolific and admired literary biographer of his generation.’ Here, Waugh has his own say on the literary merit of a contemporary, and points out a glaring error of syntax.

I was astonished to read that, towards the end of 2024, our very own Vincenzo Barney, author of “Behind the Rhododendrons” (on Vile Bodies; 53.1) and the recent “Portrait of the Artist off His Onion” (on Pinfold; 55.1), pulled off a literary scoop. After he reviewed Cormac McCarthy’s late pair of novels, McCarthy’s companion Augusta Britt contacted him, revealing details about her relationship with McCarthy long sought out by other journalists.

Finally, as an avid reader and great admirer of Jeremy Clarke, writer of the Spectator’s Low Life column until his death in 2023, I was delighted to see him appear in EWS. Clarke was a great fan of Evelyn Waugh, as some of his best columns made clear.

I hope you find as much to enjoy in this edition as I did!

Warmest regards,

Jamie Collinson

Secretary, Evelyn Waugh Society

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Roundup: End of a Literary Era

Posted on February 8, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–This week’s issue of the New Statesman has as its Weekend Essay an article by John Mullan. This is entitled “The Death of the British Catholic Novel: Catholicism gave English literature something it needs to rediscover” and opens with this:

When the novelist David Lodge died in January, the obituaries reflected on him as a Roman Catholic novelist – perhaps the last in a line of postwar British Catholic novelists. Hardly anyone noted that his distinguished career as a literary academic was also rooted in his Catholicism. Lodge obtained his first academic post, a lectureship at Birmingham University, on the strength of his thesis: “Catholic fiction since the Oxford movement: its literary form and religious content”, composed as a graduate student at UCL in the late 1950s. This author of such an intensely Catholic novel as How Far Can You Go? (1980) – which took a group of nine Catholic students (and a young priest) in the 1950s and followed them through their subsequent trials of sexual discovery and religious doubt – began his career with a study of the very sub-genre to which he would himself contribute.

Lodge’s thesis survives in a warehouse in Essex that forms part of the UCL Library. You can still call it up. Typed blurrily on very thin paper, it earnestly tests whether religious faith can feed a novelist’s imagination. Lodge quotes (in order to disprove) George Orwell’s assertion in “Inside the Whale” that “the atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel”. The roll-call of notable Catholic novelists before the 20th century (all discussed in Lodge’s thesis) would hardly challenge Orwell’s anti-Catholic dictum: EH Dering, Mrs Wilfrid Ward, Robert Hugh Benson… John Henry Newman’s Loss and Gain, a bildungsroman about a convert to Catholicism, may have been a Victorian bestseller, but is now unreadable.

Yet later Catholic fiction almost changed Orwell’s mind. On his deathbed, he was composing a piece on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (an article that he did not live to finish). Waugh had been received into the Catholic Church in 1930, the year in which Vile Bodies was published, but this was his first explicitly Catholic novel. Orwell, his friend and admirer, regretted the new influence of religion on his work. “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be (ie as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions.”…

Mullan goes on in some detail to consider the careers of other Roman Catholic novelists of the period, focussing particularly on Graham Greene and Muriel Spark. In the case of Greene, Mullan discusses how the religious themes in his The End of the Affair are related to those in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. He ends with a brief consideration of the works of Hilary Mantel, who was born a Roman Catholic but renounced her religion. The article concludes with this:

The British Catholic novel now looks like a historical phenomenon, a thing of the past. David Lodge chronicled it and was there at its end. Yet what Catholicism gave the British novel – a means of “elucidating a moral pattern” – was something valuable. It is still what novels need to find.

The full article can be read at this link.

—The Spectator has a brief article in its “Mind Your Language” series. This is written by Dot Wordsworth and is entitled “‘Loved Ones’ are everywhere at this time of year.” Here’s the text:

“My heart will melt in your mouth,’ said my husband gallantly, unwrapping some leeks from a copy of the Sun which bore this suggestion: ‘Create a special Valentine’s Day message for a loved one with this decorate-your-own gingerbread heart, £2, new in at Morrisons.’

Loved ones, even dogs and cats, are fair game for hearts at this time of year. The astrologer Russell Grant warns Pisces about ‘a loved one’s wellbeing weighing on your thoughts’. At other times, loved ones are dead, the phrase being used without irony in broadcast reports of air disasters, war and inheritance tax. It annoyingly presumes that all relations who die are loved.

The Oxford English Dictionary finds examples of loved one from the 18th century onwards. It notes that in recent times it frequently makes conscious reference to the phrase in Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One (1948), quoting this example: ‘I saw the Happy Resting Place of Countless Loved Ones. And I saw the Waiting Ones who still stood at the brink of that narrow stream that now separated them from those who had gone before.’ Waugh had taken his family to California in 1947. While there he visited Forest Lawn, with horrid fascination

Curiously, Aldous Huxley had a similar experience two decades earlier, but in Chicago, as he recounted in Jesting Pilate in 1926. The telephone directory carried an advertisement for a firm of undertakers, or rather morticians: ‘Their motor-hearses were funereally sumptuous; their manners towards the bereaved were grave, yet cheering, yet purposefully uplifting; and they were fortunate in being able to “lay the Loved Ones to rest in – graveyard, the Cemetery Unusual”.’ It takes politicians with tin ears to take the object of Huxley and Waugh’s ridicule and adopt it as a solemn expression of sympathy.

–The Washington Post has an article in which it announces the retirement of its long-serving book editor Michael Dirda from his production of regular weekly reviews. He will continue writing for the paper on the subject of books but on a less regular basis. The article is followed by a Q & A which includes this exchange:

Q. Do you have a few reviews you remember most vividly or fondly? Not because they were raves necessarily, but because the act of writing them and thinking about them has stuck with you?

That’s a subtle question. I once wrote a piece of several thousand words for Book World in which I surveyed then-current biblical scholarship. I must have read 20 books, but the whole project was deeply gratifying. In another life, I did earn a PhD in comparative literature, and there’s a scholarly side to me that I like to allow out now and then.

I also once wrote a column about spending three weeks reading the six volumes of Arthur Waley’s translation of Murasaki Shikibu’s “The Tale of Genji.” That book was a revelation and led me to explore classical Japanese literature and culture. I had a similar experience with Ferdowsi’s “The Shahnameh,” in Dick Davis’s translation of the Persian epic, and with Gene Wolfe’s intricate and tricksy masterpiece “The Book of the New Sun,” the high point of late-20th-century science fiction.

Over the years, I discovered a couple of dozen contemporary writers whose work spoke to me with particular charm or power. I reviewed as many of their books as I could. These included Russell Hoban, John Crowley, James Salter, Steven Millhauser, Gilbert Sorrentino, Guy Davenport, Anthony Hecht, M.F.K. Fisher, Angela Carter, Terry Pratchett, Jack Vance, John Sladek, Robertson Davies, Daniel Pinkwater and Penelope Fitzgerald. What’s more, I think I must have reviewed nearly every nonacademic book written about Evelyn Waugh and Vladimir Nabokov.

Truth is, I’ve loved a lot of books. In my hot youth, it was my ambition to read all the classics of world literature. I still have quite a few to get to.

Oh, but I should mention the review I most often recall when I give talks. It was a scorched-earth destruction of Judith Krantz’s novel “Dazzle.” My lead was: “I read most of ‘Dazzle’ in one sitting. I had to. I wasn’t sure I could face picking it up again.” The kicker, which I won’t quote, is even better. But W.H. Auden convinced me that writing snarky negative reviews — which, by the way, is dead easy — was bad for one’s character, so I’ve tried to avoid doing so as much as possible.

The full article and interview can be accessed at this link.

–St John’s College in Annapolis and Santa Fe has published a list of its courses on offer this summer at the Santa Fe campus. This one may be of interest:

Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor

Steve Isenberg and Mike Peters
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 7–11, 2025
IN-PERSON

As we mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, it is timely that we read the best novel to emerge from that war, Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor. Waugh, a captain in the Royal Marines, imaginatively transforms his personal experience, coupling it with an acute sense of character and foible, farce and tragedy, heroism and cowardice, faith and despair. He created a full picture of British life at home, in the officer’s mess, in battle, from false starts in the Phony War to harrowing days in Greece and Yugoslavia. Comic wit, serious purpose, and heart join to summon a world long gone, yet living anew in this vivacious drama. Americans can discover here aspects of World War II uniquely beyond our literature.

Text: Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honor. Back Bay Books, ISBN 978-0316216692

Registration and other details are available here: https://www.sjc.edu/santa-fe/programs/summer-classics/seminar-schedule

–Somerville College, Oxford, has posted this notice on the internet:

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Catherine Peters (married name Catherine Storr) on Sunday 12th January, aged 94. Catherine taught English Literature at the college between 1980 and 1991, and wrote notable literary biographies of Thackeray (Thackeray’s Universe: Shifting Worlds of Imagination and Reality, 1987) and Wilkie Collins (The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, 1992), as well as books on Dickens and Byron.

She graduated with the top first class degree in English Literature aged 50, in 1980, from St Hugh’s College. Daughter of literary agent A.D. Peters, who represented major writers such as Evelyn Waugh, she was married to psychiatrist Anthony Storr (Wadham and Green Templeton Colleges).

Catherine’s family will hold a memorial in Somerville later this year to commemorate her life. Details will be put here when they are available, and invitations will be sent to those students reading English when she taught in College.

She will also be remembered as part of this year’s College Commemoration Service, on Saturday 14th June, to which all alumni are invited.

The family have asked that anyone who remembers Catherine might consider donating to Marie Curie in her memory: https://catherinestorr.muchloved.com. She benefited hugely in her last years from night-time care from Marie Curie nurses.

 

 

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