–The Daily Telegraph has posted a letter from a reader who comments on Simon Heffer’s article on rereading Brideshead Revisited that was mentioned in our last posting:
SIR – Simon Heffer suggests that Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited “isn’t that good after all” (Hinterland, June 20).
I would argue that, as an elegy for the great country house and its inhabitants, which were in decline in the second half of the 20th century, the novel is unique.
Fortunately, Waugh’s pessimism was only partly justified. Though a great number of such houses were demolished in the year’s following the novel’s publication, a surprising number still exist and remain in the hands of families that built them. They are a significant part of our shared heritage.
For the way it deals with this important subject, Brideshead stands apart from Waugh’s other novels, as well as those of his contemporaries.
Robin Bryer, Yeovil, Somerset
The letter is reproduced in the Telegraph’s 23 June 2026 issue under the heading Rereading Brideshead.
–Vice President J. D. Vance has written a book entitled Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. This had been widely reviewed, and the following comments appeared as the opening paragraph of the review on the Substack website Quillette:
The novelist Evelyn Waugh was once asked how he reconciled his lousy personal behaviour—which included drunkenness, antisemitism, and cruelty to friends and foes alike—with his Catholic faith. No one could imagine, Waugh replied, how vile he would have been were he not a Catholic. That retort came to mind as I read US vice president JD Vance’s new book, Communion, about his conversion to Catholicism. Since joining the Church of Rome in 2019, Vance has not exactly been a paragon of virtue. Once an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, whom he called “America’s Hitler,” he changed his tune as soon as he needed Trump’s endorsement. (“I need to just suck it up and support him,” he confessed.)…
The full review is available at this link. A similar point may have been made in a review by Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal but is unavailable without a subscription.
–Another Substack post also contains a discussion about Waugh. This relates to his breakdown which he described in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Here is the opening:
What happens when a master of sharp, satirical prose completely loses his grip on reality in the middle of the Indian Ocean?
The Legend of Evelyn Waugh and His Literary Madness
By the 1950s, British novelist Evelyn Waugh had become well-respected for his early satirical novels Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust, and Brideshead Revisited.
But then in the winter of 1954, he suffered a terrible stint of writer’s block. Struggling to bring words to the page, he boarded a cruise ship bound for Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), hoping a change of scenery would spark his creativity again.
He was seeking inspiration and adventure. Instead, he stepped into a real-life psychological horror story…
The full article by Julie Cantrell is available here.
