The Danish cultural journal Critique has published for the first time the full version of an essay on Waugh’s life and work written in 2009. This is entitled “Evelyn Waughs korstog mod moderniteten” (“Evelyn Waugh’s Crusade Against Modernity”) and is summarized in this introductory paragraph:
The author Evelyn Waugh developed dramatically from the ultra-modernist, depicting the decadence of the British upper class, to a sharp conservative author who in Christianity saw a way of development for Western Civilization. The great British satirist Evelyn Waugh’s conservative modernity criticism is the subject of lecturer, PhD. Søren Besenbacher’s article from Critique II (2009), which we have reproduced here from the original manuscript on the occasion of the 10th Anniversary Jubilee.
Besenbacher concentrates mostly on Waugh’s novels, discussing the modernism in Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies and then, following his divorce and conversion, the religious themes developed in Brideshead Revisited and Sword of Honour. There are brief references to A Handful of Dust and Put Out More Flags but the other novels are hardly mentioned. Finally, the article looks briefly at Waugh’s political philosophy (such as it is) in Robbery Under Law, the only non-fiction book that is mentioned. The translation from Danish is by Google with a few edits.
