—Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington has announced a Fall schedule of literary podcasts and other activities. One of these features a four-hour discussion of Brideshead Revisited in two separate podcast episodes. Here is their description:
One of the most beloved and confounding works of 20th century British literature, Brideshead Revisited poses a unique challenge to today’s readers. Even the author himself, Evelyn Waugh, couldn’t decide whether the book was his masterpiece or a disaster. Is the book a nostalgic celebration of the aristocracy in decline or a poison-pen dissection of British classism? How does the book’s portrayal of the loving friendship between its two male protagonists come across read through a contemporary lens? The inspiration for a classic British miniseries as well as the recent instant cult classic film Saltburn, Brideshead Revisited won’t leave us alone. In this two-session course, we’ll dive into this lyrical and deeply affecting book together to unlock its mysteries.
Reading Schedule:
Session One: Please read the Prologue and Chapters 1-6
Session Two: Please read Chapter 7 to the end
Two Mondays: November 4 and 11 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. ET Online
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (9780316242103)
Aaron Hamburger is the author of a story collection titled The View from Stalin’s Head which was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and nominated for a Violet Quill Award. He has also written three novels: Faith for Beginners, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, Nirvana is Here, winner of a Bronze Medal from the 2019 Foreword Reviews Indies Book Awards, and Hotel Cuba, a finalist for the 2024 Bridge Book Awards. In 2023, he was awarded by Lambda Literary with the Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Tin House, Tablet, O, the Oprah Magazine, and many others. He has taught creative writing at Columbia University, the George Washington University, New York University, Brooklyn College, and the Stonecoast MFA Program.
Booking, fees and other details are available at this link.
–The New Statesman has a review of the final volume of the late Jeremy Clarke’s Low Life columns from The Spectator. Here are the introductory paragraphs:
One passes by the graveyard so often that sooner or later one falls into it, says the Russian proverb. Jeremy Clarke wrote the “Low Life” column in the Spectator from 2001 until his death from cancer, aged 66, in May 2023.
The column had been created by Jeffrey Bernard, recruited to the Spectator in the 1970s by the then editor, Alexander Chancellor, who admired Bernard’s writing in the New Statesman and devised “Low Life” to complement the “High Life” offerings of the gossip columnist, Taki. Bernard, an alcoholic, diabetic and perpetual chancer, excelled in exquisitely poised accounts of his chaotic days, making what would be painful to encounter – his editor described him as a nightmare; his agent called him a little shit – hilarious to read.
That feat seemed to be wholly individual, yet the column didn’t perish with Bernard in 1997. There have been two great exponents of such derelict dandyism since: Nicholas Lezard, in “Down and Out” in this magazine, and Jeremy Clarke.
Jeffrey Bernard was a fallen nob. Jeremy Clarke, lower middle class, raised in Southend, left school with two O-levels and supported West Ham. His dedication to drink, drugs, sex, partying and general mayhem, resulting in a number of convictions, was supplemented by work as a bin man and an assistant in a psychiatric hospital. Yet he was profoundly literary, his great inspiration being early Evelyn Waugh, above all the relished anarchy of Decline and Fall…
The book is reviewed by David Sexton. Here’s a link.
–Frank McNally writing in the Irish Times ruminates on the correct adjectival form for the surname of the poet James Clarence Mangan. Here’s an excerpt:
…I suspect the previously standard adjective for Mangan, by the usual rule of these things, was “Manganesque”. But Manganese is so much better it will surely stick now. Besides which, I’m not sure there are any rules for such words, beyond what sounds right.
There is of course a Wikipedia page listing all the known eponymous adjectives. They typically involve just adding “an” (eg Wildean), “ic” (Homeric), “ist” (Stalinist) or “ite” (Thatcherite) to the end of the name.
But as with verbs, there are also a few irregular ones, mostly (it seems) to do with the inability of the dominant English accent to pronounce certain sounds.
At least I used to assume that was why the literary style of Evelyn Waugh – whose surname many English people would have us believe sounds exactly the same as “war” – has become known as “Wavian”.
Or similarly, that we must use “Shavian” to describe things pertaining to our own George Bernard Shaw. But then again, it seems it was Shaw who started this habit, and that it’s based on a Latin joke.
As Nicholas Grene explained in a letter to this page some years ago, Shaw told his early biographer Hesketh Pearson that the adjective arose when somebody found a medieval manuscript by another Shaw with the marginal comment: “Sic Shavius, sed inepte” (“thus Shaw, but badly”).
—The Spectator has a review of a new book entitled Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans. The review is by Amanda Craig and opens with this:
Books and films set in stately homes continue to fascinate us, and Lissa Evans’s latest novel is likely to increase our appetite. It is 1945, and Dimperley Manor, the large, dilapidated home of the Vere-Thissetts near Aylesbury, has been almost emptied of its wartime evacuees. Only the widowed Zena Baxter (who adores Dimperley) and her small daughter remain, and the place has become a millstone round the neck of the heir, Valentine. The new baronet is expected to marry a rich bride to save his ancestral home. The nation, battered and bloodied, has just voted overwhelmingly for Labour. Is it a new dawn or a disaster?
All this might seem familiar to fans of Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Hannah Rothschild and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. The mad relations living under one giant leaky roof, the shabby furnishings, brown tap water and discomforts of being cash-poor, snobbish and servantless are what render the subjects of class and property entertaining. But in the hands of Evans, one of our finest writers of literary entertainment, this all becomes more than an exercise in nostalgia. The second world war formed the background of her previous novels, including Their Finest (which was successfully filmed in 2016) and V for Victory. Here she shows how the war’s disruption to ordinary lives prepared the ground for everything in today’s Britain, from the welfare state to feminism. Soldiers are being demobbed and the age of Attlee has replaced that of Churchill, signalling change that will continue into our own time…
The full review is available here.
