–Several publications have carried announcements of Evelyn Waugh’s birthday. He was born on 28 October 1903 in the London district of West Hampstead. Here an excerpt from one of today’s publications written by by Patrick Neas:
“His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz — everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime.” (Evelyn Waugh – The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold)
The same could be said of Waugh himself. He had a reputation as “the nastiest-tempered man in England,” but he was also one of England’s greatest writers. Some of Waugh’s most well-known novels are Handful of Dust, The Loved One and Brideshead Revisited. Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism in 1930 after a long intellectual and spiritual search, having previously described himself at times as an atheist and a skeptic. He believed that the Catholic Church’s universality, discipline, and firm moral teachings offered a coherent response to what he saw as the disorder and materialism of the modern world.
When Edwin Newman made a short film about Waugh in 1956, he encountered a writer who seemed almost stranded in the twentieth century. Waugh openly lamented the modern world, saying he would have preferred to live two or three hundred years earlier. He shunned the telephone and the automobile and remained devoted to writing with an old-fashioned dip pen.
–The Bridport Art Center in Dorset has announced the appearance of Charles Sturridge at the center on Sunday, 1 November at 730pm. He will discuss the production of the 1980’s TV series of Brideshead Revisited which he directed. Here’s an excerpt from the announcement:
…Using selected clips and previously unseen footage, Mr Sturridge will walk audiences through the making of the series, which took 42 weeks to film and was interrupted when its leading man went off to make another film.
Audience members will also have the opportunity to ask questions during a Q&A session.
Mr Sturridge is donating his time to support the Bridport Arts Centre’s Come Together campaign, which aims to raise vital funds for the building.
In 2010, The Guardian ranked Brideshead Revisited second in its list of the top 50 TV dramas of all time.
For more information, visit the Bridport Arts Centre website.
