–The Evening Standard newspaper has published an article about a noted shop on St James’s Street. This is J J Fox and the product they have on offer is cigars. After a discussion of their history, in which it is noted that prior to 1992 they were known as Robert Lewis, there is this discussion of their clientele:
…Churchill wasn’t the only name the shop saw, as the customer ledger details. Not even the only prime minister, in fact: H H Asquith came in, so too David Lloyd George, sometimes with his son, Gwilym. There was Oscar Wilde, who tended towards cigarettes — “the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?” — but ran up a sufficiently large bill that, while jailed close to the end of his life, he was sued by the shop to settle.
Better with bills was Bram Stoker, likewise Rudyard Kipling, NoĂ«l Coward, Evelyn Waugh, Sigmund Freud. The book is a roll call of London’s who’s who — not always the great and the good but rather the famous and infamous. It is admittedly male heavy, Lady Churchill and the Queen Mother aside. But it is why you come: to stand somewhere where, for almost 240 years, history has happened. History of all kinds, big and small: many who shop here today do so because their parents and grandparents did first. Some don’t shop at all, merely look around, seeking a little connection…
Waugh would have known these cigar merchants as Robert Lewis.
–Novelist and journalist Paula Byrne has posted the following on the internet: “Turning my mind to a new Evelyn Waugh project. Just discovered that Brideshead’s Charles Ryder was originally called Peter Fenwick. Fascinating.” Byrne is of course best known in this parish as author of Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead (2009).
–An article entitled “The Life and Death of the Traditional Latin Mass” appears in a recent issue of The American Spectator magazine. It is written by S A McCarthy and opens with this:
For centuries, Catholics around the world attended the celebration of what is often called the Tridentine or Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) and was more recently called the Extraordinary Form of the Mass by the late Pope Benedict XVI. The English author and Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh wrote, shortly before the liturgical reforms promulgated by the Second Vatican Council, of the TLM’s influence on generations of Saints and martyrs. “This was the Mass for whose restoration the Elizabethan martyrs had gone to the scaffold. Saint Augustine, St. Thomas Ă Becket, St. Thomas More, Challoner and Newman would have been perfectly at their ease among us; were, in fact, present there with us,” Waugh wrote. “Their presence would not have been more palpable had we been making the responses aloud in the modern fashion.”…
