Jamie Collinson has posted the latest issue of the Evelyn Waugh Studies (No. 56.2). Here’s his description:
Edition 56.2 of Evelyn Waugh Studies is now available for your reading pleasure. Within, Jeffrey Manley reviews Lady Pamela Berry: Passion, Politics and Power, by Harriet Cullen. Berry was an English socialite and member of the Bright Young Things, and had a long running acquaintance with Waugh.
While Manley finds some worrying omissions in the book’s sources, there is a great deal here to fascinate Waugh fans. One of my own favourite Waugh stories involves a panic over the theft of his gold watch amid an insalubrious party, and I had forgotten that Berry played a key role in this vignette – and its reporting in the press. The book features Cambridge spies, Anthony Powell, disastrous holidays, sabotaged Alec Guinness performances, and our old friend Randolph Churchill. Fill your boots.
This edition’s news section is particularly entertaining and wide ranging. The John H. Wilson Jr. Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest is once again open for submissions; Father Gerard Garrigan has written a new poem inspired by Graham Greene; a bookseller has contacted the EWS with an intriguing (and bargainous) copy of Waugh’s Knox biography; Robert Harris reveals a writing credo based on a Waugh quote; and I for one learned that Irvine Welsh took inspiration as much from Evelyn Waugh as he did Acid House music.
