–A post on the website UnHerd.com seems to have been inspired by the recent book of Eleanor Doughty on the British aristocracy Heirs and Graces. This has been mentioned in several previous posts. The article is written by Pratinav Anil and is entitled “Britain is a nation of flunkies.” Here is an excerpt:
…The interwar years found the aristos properly on the skids, with huge tracts of land sold off. Brideshead Revisited is in great part a whinge about precisely this. In the postwar period, Manny Shinwell, minister of fuel and power and unreconstructed class warrior, pulled the aristocracy down another peg. He requisitioned Wentworth, that preposterous estate of some 365 rooms where guests were issued confetti to mark their trail back to bed Ă la Hansel and Gretel, and had it torn open for an opencast coal mine. Rhododendrons and holly trees fell like nine-pins before the ripper shanks…
The full article is available here.
–An article in the “Artillery Row” column of The Critic magazine discusses recent changes in the BBC’s programming policies. This is by Niall Gooch and is entitled “A Lot to Bragg About.” He notes particularly the discontinuance of Melvin Bragg’s long running Radio 4 program In Our Time. The article begins with this:
When Evelyn Waugh was divorcing his first wife Evelyn Gardner in 1929, the name of Sir John Heygate was cited in the court proceedings, Gardner having left Waugh for the young baronet. At the time, Heygate was employed by the BBC, and was required to resign, on the grounds that his involvement in the divorce might damage the reputation of the fledgling Corporation. To most modern people, this incident will seem at best quaint, and at worst morally outrageous. Conceivably they are right.
But the distaste for adultery does reflect a deep and admirable sense of purpose and worthiness that characterised the BBC from its very earliest days. “Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation”, the official motto adopted in 1927, is not a direct quotation from the Bible, but it certainly sounds like one, given its sonorous rhythm and grand idealism (maybe that is why it is so rarely heard nowadays). The idea was that the new technologies of radio — and later television — could be used to spread knowledge, understanding and virtue across Britain and the wider world, unsullied by vulgar commercial considerations. John Reith, the first Director-General, famously disliked the advertising-led free-for-all of interwar American radio…
[P]erhaps the outstanding example of pure public service broadcasting is In Our Time, a fixture of Thursday mornings on Radio 4 for 27 years, in which three academics discuss their subject for forty-five minutes, with Melvyn Bragg on hand to prod, interject and keep them on topic. It was one of the first BBC radio shows to be made available as a podcast — this was very helpful for those of us who usually had somewhere else to be at 9 o’clock on a Thursday morning, and hardly surprising, because it was really a podcast avant la lettre, with its simple format of host plus experts. The subjects covered are self-consciously eclectic; recent instalments have covered Dragons, The Evolution Of Lungs, Moliere, and Pollination. I have a distinct memory, from many years ago, of gradually waking from a deep alcohol-induced sleep to realise that I was listening to a delightful woman from Oxford talk about The Fisher King, a mysterious figure from medieval mythology, and hence that I was catastrophically late for work.
A full text of the article is posted here.
–The latest issue of the journal Foreign Policy has an article by Edward Lucas entitled “The Perils of Irresponsible Reporting of Russia’s War.” Here’s the opening:
Discussions of irresponsible media coverage often lead to the fictional character of Wenlock Jakes. Supposedly the “highest paid journalist of the United States,” this infamous figure features in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel, Scoop, the classic satire of editorial egos and reportorial incompetence. Jakes is hugely influential, despite—or because of—his loose grasp of facts.
Jakes’s misreporting changes the course of history. Having overslept on a train in the Balkans, he gets out in the wrong country. Undaunted by such minor inconveniences, he files a colorful, made-up dispatch, featuring every cliche of his trade: “barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the deserted roadway below his window.”…
—America: The Jesuit Review has an article by Katy Carl who sees coming another “Revival” of Roman Catholic literature. Here is her identification of three previous examples:
… There have been at least three major waves, and they have tended to travel westward.
The first, which took hold in France, flourished from the early decades of the 20th century through the Second World War and succeeded in giving us major influences such as Mauriac, the Maritains, Bernanos, Bloy, Peguy and Claudel. The second flourished in England in the interwar period—the 1930s and ’40s—and featured writers as different as Caryll Houselander (who published in modest numbers with the confessionally Catholic house Sheed & Ward), Evelyn Waugh (who took the mainstream by storm) and Graham Greene (notorious good-bad boy and self-hating Catholic who loved to push the envelope with readers, whether they were believers or not). The Inklings are no doubt also part of this U.K.-based second wave but are best understood on their own terms, rather than on standard terms of literary convention.
The third wave, which began to rise in the United States around the end of World War II, is the “revival” most American readers have in mind when referring to Catholic literary work. It encompasses the American writers we in the United States tend to have heard the most about—Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy—as well as minor but important figures who are often forgotten, like Caroline Gordon, Betty Wahl, Edwin O’Connor and J. F. Powers. Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, both lapsed Catholics, have an underexplored relationship to this third revival, whose relationship to the mainstream of 20th-century American literature is in turn less well understood than it might be…
The full article is available here.
