The Buxton Festival in mid-July will feature a talk by Philip Eade on his new biography of Evelyn Waugh. The talk is scheduled for Wednesday, 13 July at 1:45p in the Pavilion Arts Center; tickets £10.50. This will be a week following the announced UK publication date of Eade’s book on 8 July. Here’s a description of the talk:
In the 50th anniversary of the death of Evelyn Waugh, Philip Eade presents some of the most revealing and in some cases unknown events of his 63 years: his difficult relationship with his embarrassingly sentimental father and favoured elder brother, and the burning ambition they inadvertently provoked in him; his love affair with Alastair Graham at Oxford; his disastrous first marriage to Evelyn Gardner and its complicated annulment; his momentous conversion to Roman Catholicism; his complex interest in the aristocracy, and what the aristocrats made of him; his chequered wartime career; his nervous breakdown; his strangely successful marriage to Laura Herbert; his unconventional attitude to his six children; his sharp tongue; his devastating wit; his egomania; and the love, fear and loathing that he variously inspired.
Other scheduled speakers of likely interest to our readers are D J Taylor (author of The Prose Factory), Alexei Sayle (admirer of Waugh’s satiric wit) and Benjamin Wild (who will talk about Waugh’s contemporary, Cecil Beaton). Here’s a link to the literature program.
