–Lancing College has announced the details of this year’s Evelyn Waugh Lecture. Here is the announcement:
The Head Master, Dr Scott Crawford, requests the pleasure of your company at the Evelyn Waugh Lecture and Annual Foundation Dinner, to be held on Thursday 30 April 2026 at Lancing College.
Guest Speaker: Juliet Nicolson, British author and journalist
Juliet Nicolson is a social historian.
Her books about life in Britain in the 20th Century include The Perfect Summer of 1911, The Great Silence 1918-20 and Frostquake, the icy winter of 1962-3.
Her memoir A House Full of Daughters was followed by The Book of Revelations 1950s-2026, about women and their secrets.
She lives with her husband Charles Anson in East Sussex.Programme
6.45pm – Drinks in the Megarry Room
7.30pm – Lecture in the Sanderson Room
8.30pm – Dinner in the Dining Hall
10.30pm – CarriagesDress code: Lounge Suit or equivalent
[N. B.] Attendance is by invitation only and is extended exclusively to donors to the Foundationers’ Campaign.
If you would like to make a donation or find out more about the campaign, please contact (click to email).
Inasmuch as there is not necessarily any extended discussion of Waugh or his works, it seems unlikely that the school would extend space available invitations to Waugh Society members as it has in the past.
—The Spectator has an article by Flora Watkins about the former Prince Andrew in which she focusses on his upbringing in the royal household. Here’s how she concludes:
…There’s no dignified way out of this for Andrew, no tidy, convenient Lewis Carroll ending where he wakes up to find it was all a dream. What would the Queen have made of this latest installment in this sordid saga? Her Majesty might have gained some comfort from the fact her darling Andrew wasn’t alone yesterday, on his 66th birthday. For as Evelyn Waugh observed, anyone who has been to a British public school will always feel comparatively at home in jail.
The full article is available here.
–The Roman Catholic journal Tablet opens the lenten issue of its weekly online update with this:
St Macarius, the fourth-century Bishop of Jerusalem, appears as a put-upon provincial clergyman in Helena, Evelyn Waugh’s bouncy novel about the mother of Constantine and the True Cross. He is appalled by the Emperor’s plans for architectural glories to honour the holy places. His Lent is unsubtle:
It was a season not yet standardised in its austerity. At Jerusalem, where they kept holiday on Saturday as well as on Sunday, there were eight five-day weeks of fasting. And when Macarius said ‘fast’ he meant quite simply ‘starve’. Other dioceses indulged in mitigations – wine, oil, milk, little snacks of olives and cheese – which allowed the faithful to maintain a state of continuous rabbit-like nibbling. In Jerusalem if a man wished to attain the rewards of fasting he lived on water and thin gruel and nothing else. Some kept the full five days on this fare; many took Wednesdays off and dined heavily; others, weaker still, dined on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was left to each to judge his own capacity. But if he did fast, he must fast thoroughly; that was Macarius’s rule.
Working on Helena was one of Waugh’s Lenten resolutions in 1948, along with abstaining from wine and tobacco. That’s a more familiar agenda than the neatly-sketched ascetism of the Early Church, as is Waugh’s failure to get the book to the printers until 1950. Lent turns our New Year’s resolutions into religious obligations, with absolutely no discernible effect on the rate of success.
Dietary rules have all sorts of benefits for personal and social health. Elizabeth I’s chief advisor William Cecil was so alarmed by the damage done to the English fishing fleet after the Reformation by the end of the Friday abstinence that he introduced a bill – dubbed “Cecil’s fast” – to make it a misdemeanour to eat meat on a Friday or a Saturday, with a half-fish day on Wednesday for good measure. We’re now accustomed to inversions like Dry January threatening the pub trade.
–The Guardian has posted an article in which it identifies and discusses the “greatest ever TV romances”. Here’s a contribution by Sarah Dempster:
Charles, Sebastian and Julia in Brideshead Revisited
