Thanksgiving (USA) Roundup

–The New York Review of Books has reviewed a book by Kit Kowol entitled Blue Jerusalem. The review by Ferdinand Mount is entitled “Flipping Britain’s Postwar Script.” Here’s the opening:

Controlling the narrative is the name of the game now. We like to think of it as a new game, one that we are smart enough to see through. In British politics, it has been strongly associated with Tony Blair and New Labour. In fact, it was an ambition openly declared by Blair’s Svengali, Alastair Campbell: “We are going to take the initiative with the media announcing stories in a cycle determined by us.”

But of course it is not a new ambition at all. One way or another, all regimes attempt to impress their version of events on the public mind and memory. George Orwell put it rather better in Nineteen Eighty-Four:“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” In really successful operations, the narrative fossilizes over time into accepted fact, and historians for generations after have the devil of a job chipping away at the cement. Kit Kowol, a young Oxford historian now working in Brisbane, has taken on a particularly ticklish task in his recent book, Blue Jerusalem: to dig up and, where necessary, demolish the foundations of the conventional narrative of 1945 in Britain and to offer a rival version in which the “New Jerusalem” is painted not Labour red but Tory blue…

Waugh briefly works his way into the story later on:

…One must in fact dismiss any idea that the Conservative policy initiatives during the war were reactionary, either in intention or in effect. Evelyn Waugh was not far off the mark when he complained that “the Conservative Party have never put the clock back a single second.” The Tories, for example, eagerly embraced a report, which the coalition government had commissioned from the civil servant (and later Liberal MP) Sir William Beveridge, on establishing a comprehensive system of state welfare. They would have been crazy not to: the Beveridge Report was an instant success with the public…

–James Naughtie in the iPaper discusses what he deems the funniest books of all time. One of these is Waugh’s Scoop. Here’s what he says about that:

“I still can’t pick up Scoop without laughing aloud. Evelyn Waugh turned his own slightly ridiculous adventures as a journalist in Abyssinia in the 30s into the funniest book about Fleet Street that we have. The escapades of William Boot of The Beast newspaper never fail to entertain – and to persuade you of the endless perils about to befall you in life.”

–A Russian website has put together what looks like a collection of the covers of all of Waugh’s books that have been published in that language. I cannot think what the poster’s motivation may have been but find the collection fascinating. Here’s a link: https://fantlab.ru/autor3839/alleditions.

–The Daily Mail has posted its own obituary of David Pryce-Jones (noted previously) which is attractively illustrated and narrated by reference to an interview with his cousin Helena Bonham Carter. It’s worth a look.

–Finally, The Oldie has posted a review by Michael Barber of an exhibition of drawings. Here’s the opening:

The supreme cartoonist, Ronald Searle, stars in a new show, The Illustrators, opening on Saturday at the Chris Beetles Gallery in London. Michael Barber remembers Geoffrey Willans, Molesworth’s creator, and Ronald Searle, his illustrator

Posterity has shortchanged Geoffrey Willans (1911-1958), without whom there would be no Nigel Molesworth, ‘the curse of St Custard’s’ – a character as ‘immortal’ as Evelyn Waugh’s Captain Grimes, hem-hem.

Reviewing Down with Skool! (1953), Molesworth’s opening salvo, the broadcaster – and former Oundle teacher – Arthur Marshall commented, ‘Any author must despair on finding himself in print alongside Ronald Searle, but Geoffrey Willans need not be anxious.’