—The Middle East and North African Financial News (posting as MENAFN) has a story that explains how the end of empire led to rising inequality in Britain that helped the Leave campaign to prevail in the Brexit vote. Among the many factors marshalled to support the argument, MENAFN offers this:
The fall in the fortunes of the very wealthiest had actually begun […], after the end of World War I. As the author Evelyn Waugh wrote in Brideshead Revisited, of the fictional Marchmain and Flyte families [sic]: ‘Well they are rich in the way people are who just let their money sit quiet. Everyone of that sort is poorer than they were in 1914.’
That is the parvenu businessman and politician Rex Mottram speaking. It’s hard to say which side he himself would have backed; probably both.
–Joseph Pearce, editor and journalist, had announced that the next issue of his literary journal the St Austin Review “will be on the theme of ‘Brideshead and Beyond: The Genius of Evelyn Waugh’”. This will presumably be the November/December issue of the review which is published by the St Augustine’s Press.
–The University of Colorado has posted the details of its graduate level course ENGL 5059: British Literature and Culture after 1800. Section 002 of the course is devoted to “Modernism in Britain” and the syllabus includes several 20th Century novels. That one of them included is a novel by Waugh is not in itself surprising, but that the one selected is Black Mischief is rather out of the ordinary. The reading list includes several other relatively neglected works: Rebecca West (The Return of the Soldier); Elizabeth Bowen (The Heat of the Day); Elspeth Huxley (Red Strangers), and Mulk Raj Anand (Coolie) as well as several familiar ones. The course is taught by Dr Janice Ho.
–A blogger on the website site denominated HoleOusia.com has posted an illustrated article devoted to the life of Evelyn Waugh’s friend Alastair Graham. This is entitled Love Among the Ruins although it has nothing to do with that novella. Most of the quotes and photographs will be familiar to readers of Waugh’s biographies and Duncan Fallowell’s How to Disappear: A: Memoir for Misfits (2011) as well as viewers of Duncan McLaren’s website. There is a photo of Graham’s house in New Quay that I did not recall seeing before. The blogger (Peter J Gordon) also makes the interesting point that Graham was depicted in the works of both Waugh and Dylan Thomas and quotes liberally from both versions. At the end of the posting, there is a video entitled “Quomodo sedet solo civitas” (“How lonely sits the city”) accompanied by music, photos and text. The biblical quotation is repeated several times in Brideshead Revisited in different contexts. See related post.
In a previous post (“A Life Revisited”) on the same site, there are several extracts from and references to Philip Eade’s biography. There is also a page from an unidentified magazine article (apparently entitled “Waugh and peace”) displaying a Waugh family photo by Mark Gerson not previously seen by me.
