Mid-December Roundup

Posted on December 13, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–Charles Moore writes in the Daily Telegraph a critique of the newly issued US National Security Strategy. The article is entitled “Civilisation erasure is real, but Donald Trump is part of the problem,” and opens with this:

Amid stiff competition (including PG Wodehouse and Michael Frayn), Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop remains the funniest fictional account of newspaper journalism. One of the book’s great comic creations is the proprietor of the Daily Beast, Lord Copper, a mighty tycoon who loves the sound of his own voice. To his overawed foreign editor, he outlines his paper’s policy: “The Beast stands for strong mutually antagonist governments everywhere,” he declares, “Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.”

Scoop was published in 1938, but Lord Copper’s policy has now achieved global proportions. Last week, the White House published President Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS). I think Lord Copper would be able to claim copyright.

Words like “strong” and “robust” appear almost as often as the words “President Trump”, who is also described as the “President of Peace”. The “sole purpose of this strategy”, says the document, is “the protection of core national interests”: “The world works best when nations prioritise their interests.” The strategy offers “an American-led world of sovereign countries”…

Moore goes on to find some aspects of the NSS as sound but also much that is ill-conceived. He concludes with this: “[The NSS] cannot make up its mind whether it wants to run the world or withdraw from it. It gets cozy with Eastern dictators and creates difficulties for Western friends. In this, if in nothing else, the Trump presidency oddly resembles that of Barack Obama.” The article is available at this link.

–In The Spectator, Christopher Howse explores literary works in which the newspaper is prominently mentioned in fictional plots. Here are the introductory paragraphs:

There are decades when The Spectator is shorthand for a trait: sex (2000s), young fogeys (1980s), free trade (1900s). But I was surprised to find Henry James, a writer not given to shorthand, deploying the magazine’s name to give a sketch of Isabel Archer, the title character of his Portrait of a Lady: ‘She had had everything a girl could have: kindness, admiration, bonbons, bouquets, the sense of exclusion from none of the privileges of the world she lived in, abundant opportunity for dancing, plenty of new dresses, the London Spectator, the latest publications, the music of Gounod, the poetry of Browning, the prose of George Eliot.’

‘That half-page is sufficient to reassure me that the world goes on much as it always has’

In a way the list undermines the heroine by mixing the serious and the frivolous. James, writing as the 1880s broke, lumps Gounod in with bonbons and bouquets perhaps because the composer had spent years in London in the 1870s getting tangled up with the strange figure of Georgina Weldon and then trying to get untangled from her. A favourite subject of gossip, she was a soprano, spiritualist, serial libel plaintiff and energetic opponent of her estranged husband’s attempts to have her locked in an asylum.

In Men at Arms (1952), Evelyn Waugh uses a similar novelistic technique of suggesting character by association. On Saturdays, Guy Crouchback, the hero, of a kind, remains in barracks when there is a general exodus: ‘It was holiday enough for Guy to change at his leisure, wear the same clothes all the afternoon, to smoke a cigar after luncheon, walk down the High Street to collect his weekly papers – The Spectator, the New Statesman, the Tablet – from the local newsagent, to read them drowsily over his own fire in his own room.’…

Auberon Waugh’s work for another paper also receives some attention later in the article:

…Elizabeth Day in her new novel One of Us fictionalises The Spectator as the Witness, in which Edward Buller, as editor, had made an awkward remark about harems and Muslims, upon which the Witness offices were promptly firebombed. This must have been inspired by some comments that the late Auberon Waugh once made in the Times before he joined The Spectator about Mohammed. I won’t repeat them, but they provoked an angry mob to burn down the British Council building in Rawalpindi…

–Alexander Larman writing in the Daily Telegraph addressed the issue of grooming children in schools for sexual abuse. He found literary evidence that this a long-standing problem in both state and private schools:

…this is not the first time that abused children have not been given the chance to tell the story of what has happened to them. At the other end of the class spectrum, those who attended British prep schools throughout the 20th century suffered similarly traumatic levels of sexual abuse at the hands of paedophile adults, many of whom – like Evelyn Waugh’s Captain Grimes – took the jobs largely because of the opportunities to molest the young boys in their care with impunity (and the vast majority of these cases do appear to have been boys, rather than girls)…

–Waugh biographer Martin Stannard has an essay in which he considers how his original biographical writings and research may have affected two recent works on his subject, the author Muriel Spark: another biography and an edition of her letters. In this, Stannard focuses on how Spark had interfered with and required changes in his book. He doesn’t mention any such interference with his two-volume Waugh biography (still the recognized standard) even though members of the family complained about aspects of the final version. He does include a brief mention of Waugh:

…Wilson [the most recent Spark biographer] is surely right when she suggests that “like Caroline Rose in The Comforters, Muriel was ‘an odd sort of Catholic—very little heart for it, all mind.’” In this she replicates the cold theology of her admirers Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. (Frank Kermode once described her work as theological rather than religious.) Like Greene, she preferred to be thought of as a Catholic who happened to be a writer rather than as a Catholic writer. None of this grand triumvirate of converts was in the proselytizing business; all suffered breakdown; all tested their faith with honest doubt…

Stannard’s essay appears in a recent edition of The Lamp and may be read at this link.

–The Boston Association of Phi Beta Kappa has announced a Waugh event that may be of interest:

Join members of the Boston Association of PBK for a book discussion via Zoom, scheduled for the evening of Tuesday, January 6th, 2025, at 7:30 pm. (Please note we are meeting on Tuesday!)

Guests of participants are welcome and please come even if you haven’t finished (or even started!) the book.

The discussion will be on this book:

Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh

Selected by Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the century and called “Evelyn Waugh’s finest achievement” by the New York Times, Brideshead Revisited is a stunning exploration of desire, duty, and memory. The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love come brilliantly into focus in Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece — a novel that immerses us in the glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the empire. Through the story of Charles Ryder’s entanglement with the Flytes, a great Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh charts the passing of the privileged world he knew in his own youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh’s early satiric explorations and reveals him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity. “A genuine literary masterpiece.” –Time “Heartbreakingly beautiful…The twentieth century’s finest English novel.” –Los Angeles Times

We look forward to a lively and wide-ranging discussion with this highly recommended book as a starting place. Please RSVP to (click to email) or to (click to email).

Details about joining the event are available here.

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Advent-tide Roundup

Posted on December 7, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Times has the review (dated 2 Dec.) of a book by Waugh biographer Paula Byrne that may be of interest. Here are the opening paragraphs:

In Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder remarks that Catholics appear “just like other people”. He is corrected by Sebastian Flyte: “My dear Charles, that’s exactly what they’re not … they’ve got an entirely different outlook on life.”

Evelyn Waugh places this exchange like a hinge in the novel, signalling that Catholicism in the modern world is not a mere private devotion but a fully formed, alternative moral and metaphysical order. Melanie McDonagh’s Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholics in the 20th Century examines precisely this: the men and women for whom Catholicism provided not only sanctuary but an entirely different way of seeing…

Her choice of case studies is wide and arresting, not only literary converts such as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Muriel Spark, but artists like Gwen John and David Jones, and figures on the margins of notoriety and piety alike, from Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie), to John Henry Newman, the former Anglican theologian canonised in 2019.

After a thoughtful consideration of McDonagh’s book (which is also mentioned in previous posts), Byrne concludes with this:

…for all its breadth and insight, Converts has one curious gap. McDonagh mentions Brideshead Revisited only in passing, as though reluctant to linger over the most significant English conversion novel of the 20th century. For Waugh, Catholicism had arrived not as consolation but clarity. Father Martin D’Arcy observed: “He had convinced himself very unsentimentally that … he must save his soul.”

–In another article later in the week (6 Dec.), Times journalist Beatrice Scudeler considers Waugh in the context of her celebration of Jane Austen’s 250th anniversary this month. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Jane Austen is the reason I am a Christian. Growing up in rural Italy in the 2000s, cultural Christianity was all I knew. There was a crucifix on every classroom wall, but my parents were “Christmas and Easter Catholics”. At 14, I chose not to be confirmed — disappointing my poor grandmother, who had already had to fight my parents to get me baptised.

That same year, I fell in love with Jane Austen, who was born 250 years ago this month. Pride and Prejudice became my moral compass. Its heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, is strong-willed and stands firm in her principles; she cares more about distinguishing between right and wrong than respecting social conventions. I devoured the rest of Austen’s novels within months.

I reverted to Catholicism halfway through my university years, to my family’s shock. It was a literary conversion that had at least something to do with reading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, as is often the case. But it may never have happened if my love of Austen hadn’t predisposed me to return to Christianity…

The full article is available here.

–The American Spectator has an article by S. A. McCarthy suggesting that the Vatican may have under consideration broader usage of the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM). It was Vatican II’s restriction of the TLM that clouded the final days of Waugh’s life. This is recognized in the Spectator’s article:

It is…fitting that this news [on possible broader useage of the TLM] emerges from England. When the Second Vatican Council was still ongoing, the English author and Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh wrote a series of letters to his bishop, Cardinal John Carmel Heenan, expressing his concerns over the potential abrogation of the TLM. Waugh recounted the long history of English martyrs, whose devotion to the Mass led them to give their lives for the Catholic Faith:

“This was the Mass for whose restoration the Elizabethan martyrs had gone to the scaffold. Saint Augustine [of Canterbury], St. Thomas à Becket, St. Thomas More, Challoner and Newman would have been perfectly at their ease among us; were, in fact, present there with us…. Their presence would not have been more palpable had we been making the responses aloud in the modern fashion.”

–The New Statesman in its latest edition has produced a a list of the best books of the year selected by several of its journalists. Here’s a selection in which Tim Parks refers to Waugh:

Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s Shibboleth (Europa) is a daring, surprising and, above all, funny novel. The premise is simple. Edward, a young Oxford undergraduate, hasn’t appreciated the magical traction of having family from the African archipelago of Zanzibar, until, that is, an assortment of crazy and colourful friends encourage him to milk the fact for all it’s worth, which turns out to be quite a lot. Lambert has all the ebullience and sometimes the wit of early Evelyn Waugh. I can’t think of anyone who’s made such joyful hay out of the gloomy solemnities of identity politics.

Parks might have mentioned that Waugh himself used Zanzibar as the setting for his 1932 novel Black Mischief. He renamed it Azania but included a map in which it sits in much the same position as Zanzibar with respect to the nearby African continent. He also milked it for satirical comedy in much the same way Parks describes the use of Zanzibar in his selected novel.

 

 

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Early December Roundup

Posted on December 1, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Sydney Morning Herald reviews Salman Rushdie’s latest book (probably referring to The Eleventh Hour). The review is by Australian literary critic Peter Craven and is headed: “Unsurprisingly, death is a recurring theme in Salman Rushdie.” It contains some mention of Evelyn Waugh of which only this has survived in the SMH internet posting: “Evelyn Waugh, who for the purposes of this story is older than our hero, says he should concentrate on ‘The Matter of Britain.'” Based on earlier reviews, this is probably a reference to Waugh’s appearance as one of the characters in a story included in Rushdie’s book.

–A recent issue of the Financial Times has an article about workplace fiction. The particular book discussed is Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt. Waugh makes a brief appearance:

…Starritt says many people found the entire premise and world view of the book baffling. His first novel, The Beast (2017), was set in the newsroom of a barely disguised Daily Mail, and brought the newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop raucously back to life. A number of reviewers also described Drayton and Mackenzie as a satire. The author says emphatically it is not, preferring to call it a comedy. Refreshingly, Starritt names real companies and inserts actual people, such as Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke and European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, grappling with events such as the 2008 financial meltdown and the 2012 Eurozone crisis…

–An article by Algis Valiunas appears in the latest issue of the religious-philosophical journal First Things. This is about the work of novelist Walker Percy. Here’s an excerpt:

…Shining humanity in the most intense moments has come to be thought the particular virtue of the humanists, as though they were uniquely endowed with the insight, courage, and compassion necessary to deal with extremity. (Think of Rose of Sharon in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath,offering her maternal breast to suckle an old man dying from hunger.) Percy restores the claim of the faithful to this human excellence. This passage strikes one as more real—everydayness intruding upon the solemnity—and thus more moving than the famous deathbed scene in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, in which the adulterous ­unbeliever Lord Marchmain emerges from unconsciousness long enough for an elegant acceptance of the last rites. Here is Percy at his best…

–The Daily Telegraph’s obituary of David Pryce-Jones has been posted on the internet. It is among the best of many. Here’s a link.

–Finally, many papers have printed obituaries of Tom Stoppard, the British playwright who died last week. Several of those have noted a link to Evelyn Waugh from the beginning of his career. Here’s the excerpt from the Guardian:

…Stoppard left school at 17, initially to become a journalist on the Western Daily Press in Bristol. After a couple of years of playing around with short radio plays, his first stage play was picked up for the theatre in Hamburg and television in the UK. Moving to London, he wrote theatre reviews under the Evelyn Waugh-inspired pseudonym William Boot, before a Ford Foundation grant enabled him to escape to Berlin to devote himself to the idea that would become Rosencrantz and Guildenstern…

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Thanksgiving (USA) Roundup

Posted on November 24, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–The New York Review of Books has reviewed a book by Kit Kowol entitled Blue Jerusalem. The review by Ferdinand Mount is entitled “Flipping Britain’s Postwar Script.” Here’s the opening:

Controlling the narrative is the name of the game now. We like to think of it as a new game, one that we are smart enough to see through. In British politics, it has been strongly associated with Tony Blair and New Labour. In fact, it was an ambition openly declared by Blair’s Svengali, Alastair Campbell: “We are going to take the initiative with the media announcing stories in a cycle determined by us.”

But of course it is not a new ambition at all. One way or another, all regimes attempt to impress their version of events on the public mind and memory. George Orwell put it rather better in Nineteen Eighty-Four:“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” In really successful operations, the narrative fossilizes over time into accepted fact, and historians for generations after have the devil of a job chipping away at the cement. Kit Kowol, a young Oxford historian now working in Brisbane, has taken on a particularly ticklish task in his recent book, Blue Jerusalem: to dig up and, where necessary, demolish the foundations of the conventional narrative of 1945 in Britain and to offer a rival version in which the “New Jerusalem” is painted not Labour red but Tory blue…

Waugh briefly works his way into the story later on:

…One must in fact dismiss any idea that the Conservative policy initiatives during the war were reactionary, either in intention or in effect. Evelyn Waugh was not far off the mark when he complained that “the Conservative Party have never put the clock back a single second.” The Tories, for example, eagerly embraced a report, which the coalition government had commissioned from the civil servant (and later Liberal MP) Sir William Beveridge, on establishing a comprehensive system of state welfare. They would have been crazy not to: the Beveridge Report was an instant success with the public…

–James Naughtie in the iPaper discusses what he deems the funniest books of all time. One of these is Waugh’s Scoop. Here’s what he says about that:

“I still can’t pick up Scoop without laughing aloud. Evelyn Waugh turned his own slightly ridiculous adventures as a journalist in Abyssinia in the 30s into the funniest book about Fleet Street that we have. The escapades of William Boot of The Beast newspaper never fail to entertain – and to persuade you of the endless perils about to befall you in life.”

–A Russian website has put together what looks like a collection of the covers of all of Waugh’s books that have been published in that language. I cannot think what the poster’s motivation may have been but find the collection fascinating. Here’s a link: https://fantlab.ru/autor3839/alleditions.

–The Daily Mail has posted its own obituary of David Pryce-Jones (noted previously) which is attractively illustrated and narrated by reference to an interview with his cousin Helena Bonham Carter. It’s worth a look.

–Finally, The Oldie has posted a review by Michael Barber of an exhibition of drawings. Here’s the opening:

The supreme cartoonist, Ronald Searle, stars in a new show, The Illustrators, opening on Saturday at the Chris Beetles Gallery in London. Michael Barber remembers Geoffrey Willans, Molesworth’s creator, and Ronald Searle, his illustrator

Posterity has shortchanged Geoffrey Willans (1911-1958), without whom there would be no Nigel Molesworth, ‘the curse of St Custard’s’ – a character as ‘immortal’ as Evelyn Waugh’s Captain Grimes, hem-hem.

Reviewing Down with Skool! (1953), Molesworth’s opening salvo, the broadcaster – and former Oundle teacher – Arthur Marshall commented, ‘Any author must despair on finding himself in print alongside Ronald Searle, but Geoffrey Willans need not be anxious.’

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David Pryce-Jones (1936-2025) R.I.P.

Posted on November 19, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

The death earlier this week of writer and journalist David Pryce-Jones has been announced in the Peerage News. He is best known to our readers as the editor of the 1973 collection Evelyn Waugh and His World. This is noted prominently in the obituary posted today in the Peerage News and attached below:

David Pryce-Jones, FRSL, died 17 November, 2025, aged 89. He was a conservative author, historian and political commentator, a cousin of Helena Bonham-Carter, and with Rothschild family connections.

He was born in Vienna, 15 February, 1936, son of Lieutenant-Colonel Alan Payan Pryce-Jones (1908-2000), by his first wife, Therese “Poppy” Fould-Springer (1914-1953), a daughter of Baron Eugène Fould-Springer (1876-1929), a French-born banker, and great-granddaughter of Baron Max Springer.

David’s father was a book critic, writer, journalist and Liberal Party politician. He was notably editor of The Times Literary Supplement from 1948 to 1959, descended from the Dawnay family.

David Pryce-Jones wrote a biography, Evelyn Waugh and His World (1973). It was rather notorious for digging up conflict among the married Mitford siblings, with Pamela accusing Jessica of revealing private correspondence concerning their sister the Duchess of Devonshire. The 1976 biography Unity Mitford: A Quest followed, despite alleged efforts by some of Unity Mitford’s sisters to prevent Pryce-Jones from doing his research and publishing the book.

David Pryce-Jones married 29 July, 1959, the Hon Clarissa Sabina Caccia (born 26 May, 1939), elder daughter of the Baron Caccia, GCMG, GCVO, GCStJ (1905-1990), and his wife the former Anne Catherine Barstow (who died 15 May, 2005), by whom he had issue, a son, Adam, and three daughters, Jessica, Candida and Sonia.

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Converts, Universities and an Anniversary

Posted on November 17, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–A review by Frances Wilson in The Spectator discusses a recent book by Melanie McDonagh. This is entitled Converts. It may have been mentioned in previous postings. Here is an excerpt from the opening paragraphs:

…The 12 conversions explored by Melanie McDonagh in this absorbing study are less Halloween and more slo-mo than this, the result of a gradual accretion of faith which cannot, as Cardinal Newman said of his own defection to Rome, be ‘propounded between the soup and the fish’. Several are defined by a wearisome matter-of-factness. ‘I felt no emotion about it,’ shrugged Oscar Wilde’s former lover Lord Alfred Douglas, who converted in 1911 after reading Pope Pius X’s Encyclical Against Modernism. ‘In some ways I felt that to become a Catholic would be a tiresome necessity.’

Evelyn Waugh’s conversion, which he rarely talked about, was similarly devoid of emotion. ‘What little he did tell,’ said his friend Christopher Sykes, ‘indicates a rational approach to the faith.’ The poet John Gray, who converted in 1890 after stumbling upon a mass consisting of six peasant women and a slovenly priest in a ‘small wayside chapel’ in Brittany, went through his instruction ‘as blindly and indifferently as ever anyone did’. The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe discovered her Catholicism, aged 15, while reading The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton, himself a convert. ‘It came to me that I believed in God and ought to pray,’ she said of the experience. McDonagh focuses less on the conversions themselves, given their largely non-verbal nature, than on their influence on the life and work of the converts…

The review briefly discusses the motivations for various conversions, coming back at least once to Waugh: “If the Protestant position, as Waugh said, is that ‘I am good; therefore I go to church’, the Catholic position was ‘I am far from good; therefore I go to church’.”

A copy of a 2001 article regarding Waugh’s conversion appears on the website of the Catholic Education Resource Center.

–In another article (this one by Will Yates and entitled: How to make universities appeal to the working class), The Spectator again quotes Waugh:

…The idea of university as an investment in one’s future earning potential has become an increasingly normalised way of framing its benefits. Almost a century ago, when describing his own experiences at Oxford, arch-defender of the university experience Evelyn Waugh said: ‘as far as direct monetary returns are considered, our parents would have done far better to have packed us off to Monte Carlo to try our luck at the tables,’ deriding this as ‘a narrow and silly way to view education.’ But in recent years, it has become received wisdom that the benefits of a university education to individuals and society are primarily or solely economic. Our polling shows that the public agree that people should have to pay for the earning benefits that university education can offer, and the recent Post-16 White Paper reaffirmed the economic impact of the higher education sector, which runs to more than £250 billion…

–Harper’s Magazine is celebrating its 175th anniversary. This is recalled in a special edition of the magazine which includes links to 4 articles, apparently by Waugh, that appeared in the magazine:

“The biggest aspidistra in the world” (9/30/1947) (October)

“The cold Waugh on the literary front” (5/31/59) (June)

“Evelyn Waugh…novelist” (3/31/65) (April)

“The rudiments of teacher education” (1/31/86) (February)

None of these appear in the Waugh bibliography or collected articles (at least not with these titles and dates). It is possible that these appeared in UK publications under different titles. That may explain the 1947 article which originally appeared in the Daily Telegraph as “Why Hollywood is a Term of Disparagement” and the 1965 article which appeared in the October 1964 edition of Harper’s Bazaar as “A Secret Man”. The 1986 article must have been published posthumously, but the 1959 article is a mystery. The internet posting claims that PDF files of these are available to subscribers.

ADDENDUM (18 Nov 2025): Our reader Dave Lull has kindly sent the sources of the two Waugh references from Harper’s Magazine not identified above. The 1986 “Teacher Education” quote is taken from Decline and Fall and describes Paul Pennyfeather’s first day as a teacher. The 1959 “Cold Waugh” quote is a paragraph from a review by Waugh of a recent biography of Frank Harris. This had appeared in the 20 Feb 1959 issue of The Spectator. It is not collected in EAR. Dave also notes a review in The Oldie of Daisy Waugh’s latest novel. Thanks to Dave for providing these citations.

 

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Armistice Day Roundup

Posted on November 11, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–In a recent issue of Irish Times, Waugh came up in multiple stories. In a review of Elizabeth Day’s novel One of Us, the Times’ reviewer begins by noting that she

…deploys one of fiction’s most reliable formulas. It is the structure behind Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley and, more recently, Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn: a socially awkward  aspirant outsider attaches himself to a privileged golden boy…

In in another item, author Kevin Smith was asked to name his favorite novels. The first three on his list were The Information by Martin Amis, Scoop by Evelyn Waugh and Don Quixote by Cervantes.

—The Times newspaper has a brief article about a well-known London establishment with a connection to Waugh, the Heywood Hill Bookstore. Here is an excerpt:

…Nicky Dunne’s mission is to make things a little easier for those who find themselves so inundated with choice that making one becomes nigh ­impossible. Mr Dunne is the chairman of ­Heywood Hill, a bookshop on Curzon Street in London that was a favourite of the late Queen. Opened in 1936, it was described by Evelyn Waugh as the “centre for all that was left of fashionable and intellectual London”. If this sounds a little ­intimidating, Mr Dunne doesn’t want it to be. He offers not only a subscription delivery service for readers around the world but a team of impossibly well-read staff who will choose your titles for you…

–The Daily Mail has a feature-length story about the source of one of Waugh’s best known characters:

…Carton de Wiart survived three major global wars, was wounded more times than he could remember, including being shot in the face, and shrugged off the loss of various body parts – a hand, an eye and part of an ear – as inconveniences. Rather than retire from the battlefield, he walked straight back in after each new wound had healed, proving a point to his commanders and fellow soldiers by learning to pull the pin from a hand grenade with his teeth and to reload a revolver with one hand.

Even when not under fire, he was irrepressible. He survived plane crashes, swam into enemy-occupied territory and, undeterred when he was captured in his 60s, tunnelled out of a prisoner- of-war camp. Such was his reputation for heroism that Evelyn Waugh is reported to have used Carton de Wiart as the model for his character Brigadier Ritchie-Hook, the eccentric fire-eating officer from his Sword Of Honour trilogy…

—Vanity Fair also has a feature length story about a well-known historical personality with a less-direct Waugh association. Here is the opening paragraph:

Loelia Ponsonby, who passed away 32 years ago on November 1, married the 2nd Duke of Westminster in 1930. The partnership was, as James Lees-Milne wrote, “a definition of unadulterated hell.” What a testament to the extraordinary life of Loelia Ponsonby, later Lady Lindsay, that she refused to be defined by her hateful first marriage to one of the world’s wealthiest peers. A riotous Bright Young Thing who ruled the London social scene alongside Cecil Beaton and Evelyn Waugh, she was a virtuoso at needlepoint, a lauded hostess, and a talented journalist. Her memoir, Grace and Favour is considered one of the finest chronicles of aristocratic life that the country has to offer. Three decades after her death, here is everything you need to know about the marvelous Lady Lindsay, once the Duchess of Westminster…

 

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Roundup: Vileness Revisited

Posted on November 3, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

—William Cash writing in The Times newspaper recalls a Hollywood expat group from the 1990s that was called “the Viles” (at least by him) and explains why Ghislaine Maxwell failed to fit in. Here are some excerpts from his article:

…It’s not often that a journalist can claim to have coined a phrase that somehow catches the zeitgeist. Tom Wolfe did it memorably with “Masters of the Universe”, describing the Eighties money fever world of Wall Street, and Evelyn Waugh nailed it with his tribal portrayal of the decadent and titled party world of the “Bright Young Things” of prewar London.

Which brings me back to May 1997 and a splashy eight-page story in Los Angeles Magazine entitled “You’ll never have tea again” with the standfirst “The British set has come to conquer Hollywood. They’re rich, they’re naughty, and they love a good spanking”. Enter “the Viles”, as I first named this louche and often aristocratic expat LA set.

The Viles was a phrase borrowed from Waugh’s 1928 novel Vile Bodies with Waugh, who converted to Catholicism in 1930, taking a quote from the Bible (Philippians 3:21: “change this vile body”) and using it for satirical purposes.

In the magazine piece I wrote about this gloriously wild and colourful set of expats in LA who included Charles Finch (the film producer son of the actor Peter Finch), the Old Harrovian film producer George Waud (who is now married to Charlotte Tilbury), and my dear friends the producer Julia Verdin and the actress Elizabeth Hurley. The Viles phrase stuck. However, I’d rather forgotten this social species until they re-emerged in the news this week thanks to a photograph which appeared on social media of Ghislaine Maxwell at a James Bond party in New York with the former LA fixer and party boy Sean Borg, as well as Verdin and Hurley…

Other Waughs also interacted with Cash’s “Viles” on visits to Hollywood:

That Waugh’s granddaughter Daisy was in LA trying to make it as a screenwriter helped the media with their labelling. She and her father, Auberon, known as Bron, were at my 30th birthday dinner at my suburban Valley house, along with Hurley, Hugh Grant and the directors Nic Roeg and John Irvin.

After recalling several incidents from the flourishing of the Viles, Cash looks back to earlier manifestations of British influence in Hollywood.

…It was all very different from the tiny expat Hollywood world of the Twenties and Thirties, when monocle-wearing Brits including Basil Rathbone and David Niven played cricket in cream linen flannels under the palm trees. As Sir Ambrose Abercrombie, the president of the Hollywood Cricket Club in Waugh’s black satire The Loved One, says: “We Limeys have a peculiar position to keep up, you know. They might laugh at us — the way we talk and the way we dress; our monocles — they might think us cliquey and stand-offish but, by God, they respect us.”…

Here’s a link to the complete article which is also handsomely illustrated.

–The New York Times has the review of a new book by Salman Rushdie entitled The Eleventh Hour.  This includes three short stories and two longer ones. One of the latter can fairly be considered a “campus novella,” according to reviewer Alexandra Jacobs. It includes an appearance by Evelyn Waugh:

…In the muddled middle is “Lost,” a campus novella meets “The Sixth Sense” meets “A Christmas Carol” meets Arthurian legend.

A college professor, the Honorary S.M. Arthur, wakes up dead at 61. Well, we’ve all wondered what that’slike. Here it’s envisioned as a pea-soupish “foggy Limbo” — like that of a newborn, suggests a female student marooned on winter break whom the professor manages to haunt.

Arthur had been a literary prodigy, a one-hit-wonder novelist who’d finagled a lifetime residency, encouraged by Evelyn Waugh. But unlike Rushdie, who wandered “lost” into an aged E.M. Forster’s office at Cambridge, he never delivered on his early promise…

Here’s a link.

—The American Spectator reviews a new novel by Scott Johnston entitled The Sandersons Fail Manhattan. This is described by reviewer Bruce Brawer as something of an update of works such as Diary of a Mad Housewife and The Bonfire of the Vanities from the closing years of the 20th century. In this, a well-connected and well-off couple become teachers at an upscale New York girls school in the hope that this will facilitate acceptance of their daughters into upscale universities such as they themselves attended. They unexpectedly confront a new teaching staff with other ideas, namely to use the school to promote the interest and university acceptance of handicapped, low income, culturally deprived children. Here’s an excerpt from the review:

…At the outset, pegging this as a light comic novel, a fast and superficial read, one doesn’t expect to care about any of these people. But one ends up cheering for several of them — and wishing for some of the others to get their just desserts. I’ve already mentioned Diary of a Mad Housewife and The Bonfire of the Vanities, but at times, while eagerly following this narrative, one is reminded of the comic novels of Evelyn Waugh and David Lodge, among others.

Diary was, of course, a movie based on a novel, and Bonfire became a movie too; I’d suggest that Sandersons would be a rollicking good film — although, for obvious reasons, I can’t imagine any Hollywood studio touching it. I can only hope that Angel or the Daily Wire, or some other counterculture producer, will snap it up. They’d be happy they did.

–Finally, The Express newspaper has discovered ITV’s rerun of the 1981 TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. Here’s the conclusion of the paper’s reviewer Maria Leticia Gomes:

…A significant part of its success lies in its dedication to Waugh’s original prose. Producer Derek Granger and director Charles Sturridge insisted that 95% of the dialogue was lifted directly from the book, giving the series a literary gravitas that few adaptations have equalled.

The programme also garnered critical acclaim during awards season. It claimed two Golden Globes, including Best Miniseries, and bagged an Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series.

Audiences revisiting it today remain equally captivated. On IMDb, one fan hailed it “the best miniseries ever made,” praising its “beautiful” direction, “remarkable” cast and “amazing impact.”

 

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Evelyn Waugh’s Birthday: 28 October 1903

Posted on October 28, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

Several papers have noted Waugh’s birthday. The Sunday Times earlier this week has even offered up a sort of present. This is a new book that contains new stories in which the P G Wodehouse character Jeeves is prominently featured. This is entitled Jeeves Again and is reviewed by Patrick Kidd. Here is an excerpt:

…Many try to copy him and drown in pastiche, although Sebastian Faulks made a good fist of Jeeves and the Wedding Bells and I enjoyed Ben Schott’s spy capers Jeeves and the King of Clubs and Jeeves and the Leap of Faith. Now a new Woostershire XI (plus scorer) has been selected to take on the challenge, with mixed success. Jeeves Again, a collection of 12 new short stories, is full of fizz and variety, but not every googly lands on the button.

This is not because many of them have “updated” the setting to the modern day, when deference is dead. After all, Wodehouse’s essence is in the spirit, not the social situation. His gentle humour can endure change. As Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1961: “Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own.” Don’t we all need a Jeeves now?…

The book is published in the UK by Hutchinson Heinemann and is available  for £22 and from Amazon.com in the USA for $29.99.

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Halloween Roundup

Posted on October 26, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–A new biography of Oscar Wilde has been issued. This is After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal by his grandson Merlin Holland. It is reviewed in Literary Review by Thomas W Hodgkinson who summarizes it as describing the unique legacy of how Wilde’s life and scandals affected the lives of his family, including the biographer Merlin.

Two Waughs are mentioned in the review. Firstly, it notes that Wilde’s son Vyvyan (Merlin’s father) died after having had a “boozy lunch” at the the Beefsteak Club with Alec Waugh. Secondly, there is this brief discussion of Evelyn’s assessment of Wilde:

..it’s best to ignore the publisher’s claim that this book is ‘the definitive study of Oscar Wilde’s posthumous reputation’. It isn’t anything of the kind. We learn something about changing attitudes towards homosexuality in the 125 years since Wilde’s death, but we get little on his critical standing. His society comedies have always been popular, but for decades Wilde was seen as a lightweight. In an article in 1930, for example, Evelyn Waugh dismissed his talent as ‘unremarkable’ and sneered at his epigrams and paradoxes as ‘monkey-tricks of the intellect’. Since then, he has been accepted as a writer to be taken seriously – one who bears comparison with Waugh himself, say, combining social snobbery with perfect pitch and a fine gift for silliness.

The book is available in the UK and US from Europa Books: 652 pages, £30. The Amazon.com price in the US is $37.50. The review is available here. Reviews are also available in the Evening Standard and the Guardian.

—The Times newspaper has posted an attractively illustrated narrative commemorating “100 Years of Art Deco“. This is by Hannah Betts and focusses on Claridge’s Hotel in London as offering an outstanding display of the movement (which, according to her, received its name only in 1966). Waugh’s work is described as an example of Art Deco in literature:

…The most coruscating of the Bright Young Things, the socialite Stephen Tennant, was said to be the model for Evelyn Waugh’s Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, Miles Malpractice in his Vile Bodies, and Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate. Joining him was a cast of exotic characters thumbing their noses at post-war austerity with rallying cries of “Darling!” and “Too, too divine!”

The only thing this most social of sets took remotely seriously was its partying. Evelyn Waugh catalogued these excesses in Vile Bodies, his bestseller of 1930:

“Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties…”

The article may be found here.

–Eleanor Doughty has written an article about the Roman Catholic aristocracy that appears in the latest issue of The Tablet magazine. This is entitled Brideshead Recycled. Here is an excerpt from the opening paragraphs:

…The story of the British upper class in the twentieth century and beyond is a mixed one – of deference lost, landholdings shrunk and relevance questioned. Despite it all, the titled, landed aristocracy is still going strong. But what of its Catholic contingent? Time was when either the seminary or the convent was a definite career path for the young, privileged Catholic…

The article goes on to describe the lives of several surviving Roman Catholic families of ancient vintage without really focussing how they relate to the family Waugh created in his novel. Waugh’s characters had ancient Catholic roots, but from the mother’s side, which doesn’t seem to have been particularly wealthy. The money came from the father’s side, and that family was Anglican. He converted to Catholicism in order to marry his Catholic wife. Whether there are similar instances in the families discussed in the article seems likely but they have not been fully developed. Here’s a link in case others want to dig deeper.

–The Australian literary journal Quadrant has published an article by Ian Callinan entitled “A Trilogy of Trilogies”. Among those he discusses is Waugh’s Sword of Honour. Here’s an excerpt.

…Waugh, in this writer’s estimation, wrote the best novel of the Second World War in penning the three volumes of the Sword of Honour sequence. Waugh had an unmatched and perfectly honed style which could make the tragic comic and the comic tragic to create an almost perfect tragicomedy in the closely related fates of the faithless Virginia and her gentle and faithful husband Guy Crouchback. Although the Sword of Honour series is about the war, there were only two episodes of actual direct warfare in it, brilliantly recounted on the basis of Waugh’s own participation in them: the chaotic retreat from Crete, and an ill-conceived and disastrous amphibious raid on a German stronghold in north Africa. The Sword of Honour, in the view of some including this one, better achieves the moral purpose of Waugh’s Catholicism than Brideshead Revisited, the book considered by most readers to do that.

There are Waugh societies all over the world and practically anything that might be written about him here is otiose. For a short time some years ago, I was attached to the law faculty of the University of Indiana, the principal campus of which was at Bloomington where the faculty kindly arranged for me to have lunch with Professor Beaty, an authority on Waugh and Lord Byron, who had written The Ironic World of Evelyn Waugh, because they knew that I was a fan of Waugh. When I asked this literate man whether he taught Waugh and Byron in his lectures, he replied, in words worthy of Waugh himself, that it was difficult to excite the interest of the children of pig farmers in Brideshead Revisited or Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage…

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