—The Times has published an early interview of new PM Andy Burnham which relies on a well-known Evelyn Waugh opinion:
The prime minister in waiting is already in hot water after admitting he puts milk in first when making tea to “soften” the bag.
In a rapid-fire questions style interview with the PoliticsUK website, Andy Burnham was asked for his stance on topics ranging from socks and sandals (for), single-file queuing at bars (against) and making a brew.
He said he put milk in first. “I don’t know why. I just have a feeling that it softens the tea bag a bit and makes it stronger,” he said. “I might be wrong, and I know that will offend a lot of people, but there will be no legislation to ban that.”
The debate may have its roots in the class system. Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1955 that “all nannies and many governesses, when pouring out tea, put the milk in first … sharp children notice that this is not normally done in the drawing-room”…
–The London Review of Books has somewhat belatedly published a rather detailed review of Melanie McDonagh’s book Converts. This is by Michael Ledger-Lomax and is entitled “Pattern in the Carpet”. After an extended discussion, the book concludes with a comparison of how converts Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene reflected their faith in their writings. Here’s an excerpt:
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) showed that Waugh could rouse himself to think innovatively about the way the supernatural might bend the novel to breaking point. The voices that accuse its tweedy convert hero of imaginary crimes turn the cabin of his ocean liner into a demonic confessional and their menace lingers even after we learn Pinfold caused them by the improper mixing of medications. Pinfold could have been a patron saint for a Catholic postmodernism. Waugh recognised as much when he welcomed Muriel Spark’s first novel, The Comforters (1957), as an essentially Catholic book. Spark, a self-described ‘Gentile Jewess’ who had converted to Canterbury then Rome in quick succession, pursued in this and subsequent novels a sort of Roman Calvinism in which her characters become uneasily aware of their hard and sometimes brutal manipulation by a narrator who is as indifferent to the small facts of time and space as is God himself…
—The Wall Street Journal has posted an article prominently citing Evelyn Waugh in which it considers the quality of writing that may be produced by a machine against that produced by human writers. Here’s the opening:
Regarding Richard Dooling’s “AI and the English Language” (op-ed, July 3): Evelyn Waugh once said that the English language is “incomparably rich and can convey every thought accurately and elegantly.” Its craftsmen bear a weighty responsibility. A large language model can sift, sort and mimic to perfection, but to what degree does the final outcome of a piece of writing depend on how much the writer, human or machine, is capable of caring about its quality?
A machine will write faster, but can it write better? Its words will be blandly pleasing, but can they sparkle? Will it bring a reader to tears? And what of the matter of instinct and feel, those aspects of artistic creation beyond the reach of logic?…
–Finally, the New Criterion has published an article by David Platzer that marks the 40th anniversary of the death of a person close to Waugh. This is Diana Cooper. Here are the opening paragraphs:
June 16, 2026, was the fortieth anniversary of the death of Lady Diana Cooper (1892–1986). Her departure was a melancholy landmark for those of us familiar with her reputation as not only the most beautiful and glamorous of women but also a great eccentric. Evelyn Waugh portrayed her as Julia Stitch, D. H. Lawrence as Artemis Hooper, and Enid Bagnold as Lady Ruby Maclean. In the 1980s, the popular press was fascinated by another Lady Di—a term it had pinned on our Lady Diana decades before—but the two women shared little other than a first name and aristocratic background. Lady Diana Cooper, though haphazardly educated in the way of well-born girls of her period, was full of wit and intelligence, knew Greek mythology, and could recite Shakespeare by heart.
At the time of her death, three volumes of her classic autobiography—The Rainbow Comes and Goes (1958), The Light of Common Day (1959), and Trumpets from the Steep (1960)—were in print, their titles all borrowed from Wordsworth. Philip Ziegler’s biography Diana Cooper was published in 1981, and Diana’s granddaughter Artemis Cooper edited and published Diana’s correspondences with her husband, Duff Cooper (1890–1954), under the name of A Durable Fire (1983). Artemis also published two other books on Diana: The Diana Cooper Scrapbook (1987) and Mr. Wu and Mrs. Stitch (1991), a book of letters between Evelyn Waugh and Diana…
