End of Wintertime (UK) Roundup

There is a scene in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One in which a magazine’s advice columnist ‘the Guru Brahmin’ (in fact ‘two gloomy men and a bright young secretary’) receives yet another letter from a compulsive nail-biter: ‘What did we advise her last time?’ Mr Slump, the chain-smoking drunk, asks. ‘Meditation on the Beautiful.’ ‘Well, tell her to go on meditating.’

The opening of Paul Hawken’s Carbon gives the impression that it was dictated by the gloomy Mr Slump in response to a climate activist asking what he should think about the destruction of the planet. Tell him that ‘to better understand the riddles and luminosity of life’ he must ‘go far upstream, and look at the flow of life through the lens of carbon’. (That is, to understand the world and how it works, look at something almost completely abstract.) Or he must remember that carbon is ‘the narrator of lives born and lost, futures feared and imagined… The flow of carbon is a story that may allow us to escape the labyrinth of anxiety, ignorance and fear the world bequeaths’.

It is clear then from the beginning that this is not to be the intriguing biography of carbon (‘the most misunderstood yet versatile element on the planet’) that the title suggests, grounded in science and research. In fact, it is not really a book about science at all. It is a series of essentially self-contained essays on the theme of the oneness of life, with all the predictable references to ‘other ways of knowing’ and the ‘ancient teachings’ of ‘Hindu or Buddhist cosmologies’…

—The Spectator also has an article by Mark McGinniss, well-known to our readers, about two anniversaries to be celebrated this year for Waugh’s friend and fellow novelist Anthony Powell. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Anthony Powell died on 28 March 2000, twenty-five years ago today. It is also fifty years since he completed his 12-novel series, A Dance to the Music of Time, written over a quarter of a century.

How well has this unique opus worn? With a title taken from Poussin’s masterpiece of the four seasons, Dance, has been described as ‘Proust Englished by P.G. Wodehouse’. But perhaps Powell’s closely-observed study of 20th-century bohemacy has suffered from being too real: its texture a trifle tweedy; its colours slightly faded.

Powell was not an escapist like Wodehouse; a moralist like Orwell, nor a satirist like Waugh. And yet his 3,000 pages, 1 million words and nearly 500 characters are still a singular and extraordinary achievement – a very English life over 60 years through the eyes of the narrator Nicholas Jenkins.

Auberon Waugh said on the publication of his father’s diaries, ‘[They] show that the world of Evelyn Waugh’s novels did in fact exist.’ This is even truer of his friend and contemporary. Powell’s Dance is not just a roman-fleuve, a series of novels, each complete in themselves; it is also largely a roman-a-clef: in essence, Nick Jenkins is Anthony Powell…

—Apollo: The International Art Magazine interviews Owen Hatherley about his new book The Alienation Effect: How Central European Emigres Transformed the British Twentieth Century. The interview opens with this response by Hatherley:

…I wanted to see if I could do a history book where you didn’t have to be particularly interested in the built environment, you didn’t have to be particularly interested in me, and where you could try and run together lots of different art forms and see the ways in which they connect.

The subject matter is a much easier question to answer because it came out of my irritation with a specific book (and, if I mention it, I want it on record that I’ve liked a lot of other things he’s done), which is Bauhaus Goes West by Alan Powers. There’s a dual thing going on in that book where, on the one hand, he suggests that maybe interwar British culture wasn’t totally insular. But I think he gets bored of that halfway through – because you can’t justify that position – and then goes, well, does it matter that it was backward at all? And I think you have to make one argument or the other. I was reading that book when I was writing Modern Buildings in Britain and trying to contextualise in the introduction modern architecture in Britain and how it came here. I went into it not really knowing what position I would take on the émigrés and the more I was reading, the more I realised that, without them, Britain would really have remained a backwater.

There’s a great Evelyn Waugh line about John Betjeman where he says – and I don’t completely agree with him – that all the stuff that Betjeman writes about is basically rubbish and second rate. This only happened because of the Second World War and the austerity that followed, meaning that the English middle classes could no longer go to Italy and France and see actually good architecture. Instead, they had to construct these cults around quite some second- and third-rate architecture. It’s unfair, but it has an element of truth. And I think a lot of that has happened again in the last 10 years. Not that people haven’t left, but they’ve left less often. There are certain times in British history where the channel becomes a wall. The last 10 years is one of those times and the 1920s was also one of those times. The reaction to the First World War was a wave of nostalgia and xenophobia and insularity. It really is one of the most culturally barren decades in Britain – in a way that really contrasts with so much of what was happening on the continent, particularly in Central Europe. The reason it was missed was partly because of that insularity and partly because it was coming from a place where British intellectuals didn’t usually look.

Britain just sits out this moment and I find that really interesting to think about. So the book started with that, rather than thinking about migration and the émigrés themselves. It came out of trying to answer that conundrum….

–The April 2025 issue of The Critic carries a story about journalism and its practitioners by Helen Joyce. This is entitled “The men making the news” and opens with this quote from Waugh’s novel Scoop:

“The general editor looked. He saw ‘Russian plot… coup d’etat … overthrow constitutional government … red dictatorship … goat butts head of police … imprisoned blonde … vital British interest jeopardized,’ it was enough; it was news. ‘It’s news,’ he said, ‘Stop the machines at Manchester and Glasgow. Clear the line to Belfast and Paris. Scrap the whole front page. Kill the Ex-Beauty Queen’s pauper funeral. Get in a photograph of Boot.’”

This is the moment when Evelyn Waugh’s wittiest creation, the bumbling William Boot, “makes good”. Accidentally sent to cover a war in Africa, Boot gets the titular scoop — that a coup is being planned — because he is too green to realise he’s supposed to follow the press pack out of town on a wild goose chase, and the local British consul is a prep school chum. Even while parodying the news business, Scoop captures its excitement: if that quote doesn’t give you the shivers, you’re not cut out to be a journalist…

–The website Anglican Samizdat carries an entry dated 25 March 2025 entitled “Buffoons are running the world” that discusses the present politicians who are struggling to govern the United States. It contains this insight:

Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy has a selection of comic characters that eerily echo the current occupants of the White House. While equally comic, I fear the real thing is more sinister. I strongly suspect that, rather like the hapless Apthorpe in Waugh’s trilogy, Mike Waltz has an unnatural attachment to a Thunder-Box stored in his attic.