Category Archives: Evelyn Waugh

Downside Abbey to Close

In a recent article, The Tablet announced that the Benedictine Abbey at Downside would be closed, after having previously been separated from the public school on the same site in Somerset. The school will remain on the site but the … Continue reading

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Evelyn’s Last Dance

Duncan McLaren has posted two articles in his Brideshead Festival series in which Evelyn Waugh ponders the contents of the last two volumes of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. These are Temporary Kings (1973) and Hearing Secret … Continue reading

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Another Look at Brideshead

Literary critic Eleanor Doughty has taken another look at Brideshead Revisited on the occasion of the book’s 75th anniversary and doesn’t particularly like what she finds. This essay is published in The Critic and is entitled: “A little too mature: In … Continue reading

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Heroes and “Hard-Faced Men”

In yesterday’s Times an opinion column by Libby Purves was headed: “We’ll remember Covid’s heroes and villains: Companies and individuals should know that the stigma of having behaved badly during this crisis will be long-lasting”. This contained a discussion of which companies and … Continue reading

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Roundup: Baby Jungman, Proust, Japan and Zeppelins

–Mark McGinness has written an obituary of Desmond Guinness for the Australian literary magazine Quadrant. In this he adds another Waugh connection not mentioned in the English and Irish papers. See previous post. After his marriage to his first wife … Continue reading

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Castle Howard Exhibition: Brideshead Revisited at 75

The Castle Howard website features a fully and handsomely illustrated exhibition of photos from the two film adaptations of Brideshead Revisited and other related sources. This illustrates in part how the two adaptations are similar in some respects and how … Continue reading

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Presentation Copy of Brideshead On Offer

London booksellers Peter Harrington have a 1945 copy of Brideshead Revisited on offer. This is a presentation copy to Mgr Alfred Gilbey, chaplain to Roman Catholic students at Fisher House, Cambridge University. There is also an unpublished letter from Waugh … Continue reading

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Tourist in Africa OUP Volume Announced

The Oxford University Press has announced the publication of another new volume in its Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project. This is A Tourist in Africa (1960) and will be volume 25 in the series. Here’s the description from the OUP’s … Continue reading

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Waugh’s Orwellian Dystopia

The Orwell Society has posted an interesting essay on the friendship of Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell with special reference to how Waugh’s 1953 novella Love Among the Ruins was intended as a response to Orwell’s 1948 novel 1984. This … Continue reading

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Ronald Harwood (1934-2020) R I P

The Daily Telegraph has an obituary of Ronald Harwood, noted primarily as a writer of screenplays based on adaptations of novels or plays.  These adaptations include such well-received films as the Oscar-winning The Pianist (2003), One Day in the Life … Continue reading

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