Summer Solstice Roundup

–Literary journalist and novelist D J Taylor has a review in the 21 June 2025 edition of The Spectator. This relates to a new book by Nicola Wilson entitled Recommended! The Influencers Who Changed How We Read where she discusses book clubs and subscription services that became popular between the wars. Its primary focus is on the Book Society and its so called “Watch Committee”. Taylor gives several examples of how the 6-member selection committee worked and the results of  its activity. Here are two examples:

…There were times, as [Nicola] Wilson acknowledges, when a selection could save a writer’s career. Graham Greene, in lowish water after the failure of his second and third novels, had his prospects transformed by the surprisingly narrow (three votes to two) emergence of Stamboul Train (1932). Even then there was a corking row when [J B] Priestley, by this point no longer a selector, read a proof copy and imagined himself libeled by the portrait of the bluff, Dickens-obsessed northern novelist Mr Savory. Thirteen thousand bound copies had to be unstitched so that Greene could make the necessary changes.

And then this:

…Daniel George caught something of the changing [post-war] atmosphere in his review of Brideshead Revisited in the [Book] Society’s newsletter of May 1945. Evelyn Waugh, he noted, ‘seemed determined to wring our hearts with lamentations for a past shared by a precious few.’

Taylor concludes that the book is “an engaging piece of publishing history” notwithstanding  a few examples of the author’s irritating habits noted in his conclusion. A full copy of the review is available here.

–Among the several reviews of the new TV series Outrageous (about the Mitford family) there is no mention of an appearance of a character named Evelyn Waugh, but in Radio Times this discussion appears:

Who is Joss? Joss, who develops a friendship with Nancy, is based on several real-life people.

“It was originally going to be [writer] Evelyn Waugh, then writer Sarah Williams thought it’d be interesting to make him Jewish, but not very openly,” he said (via The Mirror). “He’s also gay, but that’s never really talked about in the show.”

–An interview of Stephen Fry by Scott Keller for the New York Times weekly “By the Book” column includes this:

Do you think any canonical books are widely misunderstood?

What an interesting question. Evelyn Waugh thought “Brideshead Revisited” misunderstood. People mostly think “Brideshead” is a nostalgic, almost sentimental, farewell to the great country houses and grandeur, grace and careless wit of prewar Britain. Waugh, a devout Catholic convert, insisted it was about “the Operation of Grace.” My feeling is that he is the one who misunderstood it.

–Dominic Sandbrook has an essay in The Times entitled “They can never cancel the English gent.” After several paragraphs considering the history of that concept, he concludes with this:

…So when did the English gentleman breathe his last? The mid-1960s seems the obvious answer, perhaps some time between January 1963, when the MCC abolished the distinction between Gentlemen and Players, and the general election of October 1964, when Sir Alec Douglas-Home (Gentlemen) lost office to Harold Wilson (Players).

The future Sir Mick Jagger did his best to keep the flame alive, joining the Country Gentlemen’s Association in the spring of 1968, the year of the barricades. But it was no good. Today, there is only one workplace in which people can greet their colleagues as gentlemen without fear of reproach, namely the House of Commons — and that’s not much of a recommendation.

Still, if readers are tempted to revive the old ideal, they should remember three crucial rules. As a member of the Jockey Club once told Evelyn Waugh, “no gentleman ever wore a brown suit”. To quote the late Lord Curzon, “no gentleman has soup at luncheon”. And above all, as the comic writer RS Surtees reminded his readers in 1858, there is the unshakeable, “infallible rule” of life. “The man who is always talking about being a gentleman never is one.”

–MP Danny Kruger has written an article about the “Early Dying” bill which was repeated in many newspapers. The original may be the one quoted below from The Spectator:

‘Now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.’ After last week, I feel like Evelyn Waugh at the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939. The politics of ‘progress’ has found its fulfilment in the union of two total malignancies: the campaigns to abort babies at full term and to kill old people before their time. Here is our enemy, all disguise cast off…

The quote comes from Waugh’s war novel Sword of Honour.

NOTICE (23 June 2025): The final entry above has been modified to provide a more complete and accurate source.