—-A novel by Duff Cooper (husband of Waugh’s friend Diana Mitford) was briefly noted in a recent issue of Evening Standard. This novel has been reissued in the Penguin Classics series. The notice is by Melanie McDonagh. Here’s an excerpt:
Operation Mincemeat is one of the better known operations of the Second World War, thanks to the film of the same name which was turned into an improbable musical. It caught the imagination because it was so very macabre: the body of a British officer would be found washed up near the coast of Spain bearing details of an intended action in Greece and Sardinia — to distract attention from the real operation, the liberation of Sicily…
This was the scenario for Operation Heartbreak, the only novel of Duff Cooper, best known as the husband of the beautiful Lady Diana Cooper, to whom he was consistently unfaithful, a persecutor of PG Wodehouse and Tory politician. …The story is briskly told but with the unconscious insight and detail that you get from inhabiting the time and place in which the novel is situated. It doesn’t match Evelyn Waugh’s work of the period — you don’t feel that we lost a great novelist in Cooper — but it’s poignant and moving, all the more for being adjacent to reality.
Waugh and Duff Cooper kept their distance from each other but that didn’t keep Cooper from admiring Waugh’s writing style sufficiently to try to copy it.
–The Daily (or perhaps Sunday) Telegraph has a story about foreign relations between the UK and Canada. These remind the author (David Blair) of a Waugh novel:
…It seems incredible now, but British Foreign Secretaries used to mount “campaigns” on subjects like media freedom, religious liberty, wildlife conservation and sexual violence, as if countering Russian aggression and Chinese ambitions for global power were not enough to fill their time.
They would call conferences on these issues and drum up attendance by striking preposterous deals with their counterparts: if you come to my event, I’ll attend yours. Listening to these phone calls, I would silently recite the words of Julia Stitch in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop: “Why would I go to Viola Chasm’s Distressed Area party; did she come to my Model Madhouse?”…
…That novel comes up again in a Guardian profile of author Nussaibah Younis:
The book that made me want to be a writer
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh is a brilliantly funny satire of war journalism that still rings disturbingly true. It inspired me to write a comedy about a bonkers UN programme in Iraq – which turned into my debut novel, Fundamentally.
The same writer also mentions the novel in a recent article in The Times (2 February 2026) where she is asked to name her favorite book by a dead writer:
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. In this brilliant satire of war journalism, the nature columnist William Boot is accidentally sent to cover “a very promising little war” in the fictional east African state of Ishmaelia. I read it after spending the best part of ten years wandering around the Middle East trying and failing to “build peace” and I related hard to Waugh’s hapless and naive protagonist as he encounters an industry more cynical and mercurial than he could have imagined.
Waugh perfectly depicts the absurdities of westerners utterly out of their depth in foreign war zones and, despite being published in 1938, it still rings disturbingly true to this day. Even the cringeworthy racism of the book is not a million miles off from the way British aid workers and journalists still talk about the foreign countries they exploit for a living, and end up resenting. For anyone interested in satire, war journalism or the long tradition of Brits being idiots abroad, it’s a foundational read.
—The Times also has an article by Ed Potton about film-maker Emerald Fennell and her latest production, Wuthering Heights:
…she turned up the outrageousness further in Saltburn (2023), a twisted mash-up of Brideshead Revisited and The Talented Mr Ripley with extra smut in which Barry Keoghan’s lower-class interloper Oliver Quick became obsessed with his fellow Oxford undergrad, the blithe toff Felix (Jacob Elordi). Oliver danced naked through a mansion to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Murder on the Dancefloor, drank Felix’s semen-laced bathwater and humped his love object’s burial mound, while Evelyn Waugh spun in his grave. That last scene, Fennell has said, was “sort of inspired” by Wuthering Heights, in which Heathcliff digs up Cathy’s grave, twice.
She was an “incredible” director on Saltburn, [actor in that film Richard E.] Grant says. “Her jolly-hockey-sticks voice beguiles you into thinking that you’re in for a St Trinian’s escapade, but her dark sensibility skewers that with her unflinching examination of class and sexual obsession. After winning an Oscar, mothering two children under the age of five, leading a crew of 150 and a large cast, she wore her authority very lightly.”…
Waugh’s novel comes up again in a later discussion of Fennell’s education:
…She read English at Greyfriars, the Catholic friary that was at the time a private hall of the University of Oxford, indulging a “Brideshead fetish” by striding about in Thirties-style men’s trousers and braces. Affected play-acting like that fed directly into Saltburn, she has said. “So much of everything I make is me trying to come to terms with what an embarrassing person I am.”…
–Finally, The Times had another story that featured Waugh’s novel. This is in an article by Jack Blackburn on a current exhibit at London Archives. The topic of the exhibit is “History of London’s Outlaws”).
Modern policing had different concerns from highwaymen and the like. The exhibition runs into the 1920s, with the story of Kate Meyrick, the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh’s Ma Mayfied in Brideshead Revisited, who ran numerous illicit nightclubs and was sent to prison for breaking licensing laws.
Was this a censorious incident in a post-war age where there was an appetite for fun? Or the dawning of a more sensible age of regulation?
A handsome photo (probably from the exhibit) accompanies the article. Here’s a link.
