–Some of those around London may be interested in an event planned for Bank Holiday Monday. Here’s a description from the Londonist website:
ISLINGTON WALK: The Bring Your Baby guided walks team offers a tour around Islington, aimed at parents and carers with little ones in tow. Begin at Angel station and learn about the area’s history including a picturesque square that was home to George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Vanessa Bell; the spot where the ancient Angel Inn once stood; and the New River and Regent’s Canal tunnel. Finish at Highbury & Islington station, with opportunities to feed and change your baby as needed along the way. 11am-2pm
Orwell’s house is clearly marked with a plaque, but the last time I visited, there was no marker on Waugh’s house. English Heritage is unlikely to erect one there, as they have already put the one on his family house on North End Road (near Golders Green Tube Station). The Orwell plaque in Islington was not an English Heritage project.
–Novelist Philip Hensher has posted a brief essay on the website “UnHerd” reviewing the recent drop in reading which he blames partially on the publishing industry’s “gatekeepers”: Here’s an excerpt:
…Novels have shown a particularly precipitous decline in interest, even though richly enjoyable novels are still being written. The publishing industry has decided, however, that they must pass through the process of evaluation by gatekeepers, who rarely have vulgar pleasure in mind. We’ve now reached the point where winning or being shortlisted for a prize is less of a recommendation than being rudely rejected by one. John Boyne, a very enjoyable novelist, was longlisted this month for the Polari Prize before finding himself on the receiving end of a personal campaign by other, more sanctimonious writers on the list. By the time the prize cancelled itself this week, denouncing Boyne for his private opinions, several of his books had duly climbed up the Irish bestseller charts.
Meanwhile, in the general wasteland of the Booker longlist, a glorious novel inexplicably appeared. Tash Aw’s The South is one of those novels which requires the phone off, a box of chocolates, and five extra copies to press on friends. Anyone with a pulse would respond to this fabulous, explicit account of a passionate, obsessive love affair between teenagers in the heat of a Malaysian summer. Is this book good for you? Probably not. But The Guardian did its best, explaining with prophylactic tediousness that left out all the joyous filth that the novel was set “against a backdrop of tumultuous change and ominous signs of climate crisis”. (The weather, in the book, was hot.)
It’s not just the pleasures of current writing that are assiduously sealed off by such incompetent gatekeepers. How did you come to take pleasure in the inexhaustible, often disgraceful joys of the great classics, of Austen and Dickens and Waugh and Pym and Nabokov? A clever schoolteacher, perhaps, or even a challenging syllabus. But these days, most schoolteachers would, in the words of the man who prosecuted The Well of Loneliness, rather give a bottle of prussic acid to a healthy schoolboy or girl than a copy of Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant. You are going to be asked to develop a pleasure in reading from a book written five years ago, by someone of scant talent for writing but approved views about social justice. Of course you aren’t going to start reading for pleasure…
–Finally, Simon Heffer, writing in the Daily Telegraph, reconsiders the works of the “undersung” novelist Patrick Hamilton. He is “less read now than his contemporaries George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.” After noting his early 1930s trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, Heffer concludes that Hamilton’s most well known work remains Hangover Square (1941). From Heffer’s perspective, however, Hamilton’s “one book that stands out more than others” is his 1947 work The Slaves of Solitude. In the remainder of the article, he explains why. The full article is available on PressReader.com.
–For future reference, the Virginia Quarterly Review has announced that its latest issue (presumably Summer 2025) will include a copy of Waugh’s 1934 work “The Rough Life.” It is not clear from available references to what they may be referring. According to the Waugh bibliography (item 366, p. 66), the VQR in 1934 published a 7-page article by this title that referred to experiences recorded in a report of 1922 debates at the Oxford Union relating to British sovereignty in India (EAR, pp. 12-13).
