–The scripts of the TV series “All Creatures Great and Small” are being posted on the internet. Here’s an excerpt from an episode from the final series (No. 6) in which one of the vets is being introduced to a new arrival:
…Here’s my Philbrick. I rode him this morning, and something wasn’t quite right.
Hello, Philbrick.
There, there, Philly. I’m partial to a bit of Evelyn Waugh myself. The butler in Decline And Fall. Waugh’s best, for my money.
Oh, I beg to differ. But an honourable second to A Handful Of Dust.
Ha, yes.
Here is a transcript of the entire episode. This is apparently taken from the 2020 version now appearing on YouTube.
—The Oldie has posted an interview with Frances Wilson who recently wrote a biography of novelist Muriel Spark. Here is an excerpt:
…Wilson found herself not just researching Spark, but living her, telling us that things “that happened to her body tended to happen to mine,” such as losing a tooth, being burgled and becoming paranoid.
Muriel Spark didn’t just believe in fate, she believed she was inside God’s plot. She lived, she said, in “space-time space,” where events could be seen before they happened. Her fiction was filled with eerie prolepses: “He looked as if he would murder me — and he did.”
Muriel’s contemporaries didn’t know what to make of her. Evelyn Waugh told his children to pray for her “because she was a saint.” Frank Kermode said she had “the evil eye.” Bernard Levin put it bluntly: “Had she lived in an earlier century, she would doubtless have been burned at the stake as the witch that she was.”
Wilson, too, fell under her spell. She described writing the book in four months (normally a four-year process) as if in a trance…
–Wilson’s biography of Spark is reviewed by Valerie Sayers in a recent issue of the Jesuit magazine America. Here is an excerpt:
…Newman’s devotion to clear, simple language and to “writing as thinking and thinking as praying” appealed to a writer like Spark whose life had been full of upheaval. Her conversion preceded her own crackup, brought on in Spark’s telling by the Dexedrine she took to diet. Wilson’s account of the breakdown, with its distortions of language and time, is fascinating. By weird coincidence, Evelyn Waugh had during the same period experienced a similar breakdown. As Spark wrote The Comforters, the novel ignited by her experience, Waugh worked on his own autobiographical version, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Waugh’s support for the competition was a crucial boost.
–The Mirror carries a story about TV presenter Clare Balding who recently appeared in the BBC series Celebrity Traitors:
“Filming an episode of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? I discovered [my grandmother’s] father, the MP Sir Malcolm Bullock, was gay. Homosexuality was illegal in his day and it must have caused my grandmother a huge amount of shame.”
During the BBC programme, Clare uncovered that Sir Malcolm, who received the Legion D’Honneur for his exceptional diplomatic service, belonged to an exclusive social set that featured the likes of Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford and John Gielgud.
Evidence of a likely romantic liaison between Sir Malcolm and the painter and theatrical costume designer Rex Whistler, who tragically lost his life during the D-Day offensive in 1944, was unearthed.
The pair were known to dine together frequently and even embarked on a trip to Paris together. However, no love letters between the two men have survived, as such potentially damning evidence would almost certainly have been destroyed given the societal attitudes of the time.
Sir Malcolm had tied the knot with Lady Victoria Primrose, daughter of Edward Stanley, the 17th Earl of Derby, back in 1919, and they had one child together – Clare’s grandmother.
The Malcolm Bullock connection was mentioned in a previous post.
