–The Wall Street Journal has posted an article by Christopher Scalia in its Opinion section. This is entitled “Stand Tall, Short Kings: A proposal for a 5-foot-7 Hall of Fame.” It is inspired by Scalia’s recent immersion in the World Cup soccer tournament, where a major player (Lionel Messi) was of that dimension. After much discussion comparing Messi’s success with other athletes of this height, Scalia searched for other examples of success by those in other fields of endeavor. Here’s an example:
…Great writers who reach the Messi Mark include W. Somerset Maugham. I learned of Maugham’s stature from a frequent contributor to these pages, the 5-foot-7 Joseph Epstein, whose many excellent essays include one about his height. I’ve read that Evelyn Waugh was also that height and I like him so I believe it…
–The Polish journal Tygodnik Powszechny has published an article about the impact of the Brideshead Revisited TV adaptation on the Polish audience. This is by Dorota Kozinska and is entitled “A Lament for Loss: Evelyn Waugh and Brideshead Revisited.” Here’s a translation of the opening paragraph:
The first episode of “Brideshead Revisited” aired in Poland on January 6, 1990, on a Saturday evening on Channel 2, just over nine years after its British premiere. The country was shaking to its foundations, the old system was ending, and great hopes were mingled with fear and uncertainty. On the gray streets and in the gray apartments, little had changed. Images of the waning communist era have so effectively blended in my memory with the birth of the Third Polish Republic that if it weren’t for the help of a film expert friend who dug up the broadcast date from the old Polish Television schedule, I would have pushed the series’ premiere back by at least three years…
For anyone wishing to pursue the remainder of the article, it appeared on 04/03/2023 as No. 11/2023 of the journal.
–On the website Wallenstein’s Camp an article posted by Stephen Webb is of some interest. This is entitled “Where Did the Downwardly Mobile Live?” The discussion includes references to the lives of many literary characters who will be familiar to our readers (e.g., the “Major” from Fawlty Towers and Uncle Giles from Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. The article includes this in its concluding paragraphs:
…By the war time period, the literature of the period shows hotel residents as in further decline, with their position disrupted by evacuation and billeting. The narrator’s father Gervase Crouchback in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy has sold his ancestral home for it to be turned into a minor catholic boarding school (with two houses, amusingly named Crouchback and Holy Family). He has retired to rooms in a seaside town, which he shares with other marginal figures struggling to hold on to their rooms in the face of the billeting officer. Agatha Christie’s wartime detective couple Tommy and Tuppence track down German spies in a very similar milieu.
The full article is available on Substack.
