BBC Radio 4 today broadcast the final episode of the reading of excerpts from Philip Eade’s biography of Waugh as its Book of the Week. The programs will remain available over the internet on BBC iPlayer for the next four weeks. The material covered in each episode is as follows:
Ep. 1: Childhood; family; school.
Ep. 2: Oxford; schoolmaster; first publication.
Ep. 3: Marriage; divorce; conversion; Spitzbergen.
Ep. 4: Courtship and marriage of Laura Herbert; Abyssinia; Piers Court; Mexico.
Ep. 5: Hollywood and The Loved One; children; Pinfold; decline and death.
The greatest gap seems to be Waugh’s service in WWII and the writing and reception of Brideshead Revisited; another episode would have been necessary to cover those topics. The reading by Nicholas Grace was well done and never threatened to become tedious.
