New Article on War Trilogy

–The New Criterion (v. 45, No. 2, October 2026) has published a new article on Waugh’s War Trilogy, Sword of Honour. This is by John P. Rossi and opens with this:

… Is there any World War II novel that approaches the impact of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers,or the power of such memoirs as Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, all of which treated the First World War? The critic Paul Fussell believed that such literature could not be produced by what he labeled “the faceless automatons of the Second World War,” a generation not defined by fiction or poetry as their First World War counterparts had been.

One novel that arose from the disastrous impact of the Second World War that will endure, I believe, is Evelyn Waugh’s last masterpiece, the trilogy Sword of Honour, which appeared between 1952 and 1961. He initially planned a single volume but found the story so compelling he produced three distinct novels built around the character Guy Crouchback, a figure not unlike himself in some ways…

The article goes on to consider how Waugh wrote each succeeding novel and the basic stories they told. The full article raises several interesting points and is entitled “Waugh’s Last Masterpiece”. It concludes with this:

…Sword of Honour is Waugh’s last triumph, a serious contemplation of the meaning of war and its consequences, both good and evil. The story is a mix of traditional patriotism and political betrayal, in the end redeemed by an act of Christian conscience. The blend of comic characters and grim battle scenes in Dakar and Crete raises the trilogy above all other novels of the Second World War.

The full article is available here.

–Another article in the latest New Criterion also relates to Waugh. This is about the correspondence of Conrad Russell (1897-1947) who wrote to Waugh’s friends such as Diana Cooper, often commenting about Waugh’s books. The article is by David Platzer and is entitled “A Somerset Farmer”. Here’s an excerpt:

…Russell’s feelings about Evelyn Waugh (“Wu” to Diana Cooper and Russell), whom he knew through Katharine Asquith’s Catholic circle as well as Diana Cooper’s group, were mixed. He was sick with laughter when reading Waugh’s Black Mischief aloud to Diana’s aunt, but several letters to Diana about Brideshead Revisited showed much less enthusiasm, even if he admitted that “a great deal of the book is good.” He found the soldiering at the beginning the best, Oxford the worst. “What a snare the peerage and titles are to the unwary,” he confided to her. In the book, the dying marquess muses that since his son will have no children, the barony will be inherited by the eldest daughter because it descends in the female line. But in fact, since the novel features two daughters, the barony should fall into obeyance between them. “Should we tell Wu?” Russell asked Diana. “Or will it kill him?”…

The article is presumably sourced at least to some extent from the published collection of these letters issued in 1987.  This was entitled Letters of Conrad Russell: 1897-1947, and edited by Georgiana Blakiston. It is apparently out of print, as Platzer concludes his article by noting that: “John Julius Norwich, Diana Cooper’s son, thought that an edition of his mother’s correspondence with Russell would be worthwhile, and one wishes an enlightened publisher would agree.” The 1987 edition was published by John Murray.

–Another recent literary survey prominently mentions Evelyn Waugh. This is in the latest edition of New York Review of Books (8 October 2026) and is written by Michael Gorra. It relates to the New Orleans novels of Nancy Leman and is entitled “Nothing Stays Buried” signifying that he is about bring them back to life. At least one (Lives of the Saints, 1985) is related to the writings of Evelyn Waugh. Here is an excerpt of the discussion of how her writing related to that of Waugh:

…It’s a young person’s book—Lemann wasn’t yet thirty when it appeared—and reading it now I wonder how it would have struck me if I’d read it then, back when I was young myself. I doubt I would have heard so much in it, though I would have recognized its “wastrel-youth contingent” as a version of Evelyn Waugh’s bright young people; Lemann’s epigraph comes from Waugh’s autobiography, and I too was steeped in his fictional world. But there are other echoes of that dandy tradition here as well, hints of Wilde, of Eliot’s Prufrock, and also of Nancy Mitford…

A full version of Gorra’s article is available at this link.

–Finally, the BBC reports that an upcoming British literary festival will include the showing and presumably discussion of a film adaptation of an Evelyn Waugh novel: