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, ÂŁ30. 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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Roundup: Cigars, Paula Byrne and The Latin Mass

Posted on October 18, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Evening Standard newspaper has published an article about a noted shop on St James’s Street. This is J J Fox and the product they have on offer is cigars. After a discussion of their history, in which it is noted that prior to 1992 they were known as Robert Lewis, there is this discussion of their clientele:

…Churchill wasn’t the only name the shop saw, as the customer ledger details. Not even the only prime minister, in fact: H H Asquith came in, so too David Lloyd George, sometimes with his son, Gwilym. There was Oscar Wilde, who tended towards cigarettes — “the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?” — but ran up a sufficiently large bill that, while jailed close to the end of his life, he was sued by the shop to settle.

Better with bills was Bram Stoker, likewise Rudyard Kipling, NoĂ«l Coward, Evelyn Waugh, Sigmund Freud. The book is a roll call of London’s who’s who — not always the great and the good but rather the famous and infamous. It is admittedly male heavy, Lady Churchill and the Queen Mother aside. But it is why you come: to stand somewhere where, for almost 240 years, history has happened. History of all kinds, big and small: many who shop here today do so because their parents and grandparents did first. Some don’t shop at all, merely look around, seeking a little connection…

Waugh would have known these cigar merchants as Robert Lewis.

–Novelist and journalist Paula Byrne has posted the following on the internet: “Turning my mind to a new Evelyn Waugh project. Just discovered that Brideshead’s Charles Ryder was originally called Peter Fenwick. Fascinating.” Byrne is of course best known in this parish as author of Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead (2009).

–An article entitled “The Life and Death of the Traditional Latin Mass” appears in a recent issue of The American Spectator magazine. It is written by S A McCarthy and opens with this:

For centuries, Catholics around the world attended the celebration of what is often called the Tridentine or Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) and was more recently called the Extraordinary Form of the Mass by the late Pope Benedict XVI. The English author and Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh wrote, shortly before the liturgical reforms promulgated by the Second Vatican Council, of the TLM’s influence on generations of Saints and martyrs. “This was the Mass for whose restoration the Elizabethan martyrs had gone to the scaffold. Saint Augustine, St. Thomas Ă  Becket, St. Thomas More, Challoner and Newman would have been perfectly at their ease among us; were, in fact, present there with us,” Waugh wrote. “Their presence would not have been more palpable had we been making the responses aloud in the modern fashion.”…

 

 

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Octoberfest Roundup

Posted on October 11, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–The scripts of the TV series “All Creatures Great and Small” are being posted on the internet. Here’s an excerpt from an episode from the final series (No. 6) in which one of the vets is being introduced to a new arrival:

…Here’s my Philbrick. I rode him this morning, and something wasn’t quite right.

Hello, Philbrick.

There, there, Philly. I’m partial to a bit of Evelyn Waugh myself. The butler in Decline And Fall. Waugh’s best, for my money.

Oh, I beg to differ. But an honourable second to A Handful Of Dust.

Ha, yes.

Here is a transcript of the entire episode. This is apparently taken from the 2020 version now appearing on YouTube.

—The Oldie has posted an interview with Frances Wilson who recently wrote a biography of novelist Muriel Spark. Here is an excerpt:

…Wilson found herself not just researching Spark, but living her, telling us that things “that happened to her body tended to happen to mine,” such as losing a tooth, being burgled and becoming paranoid.

Muriel Spark didn’t just believe in fate, she believed she was inside God’s plot. She lived, she said, in “space-time space,” where events could be seen before they happened. Her fiction was filled with eerie prolepses: “He looked as if he would murder me — and he did.”

Muriel’s contemporaries didn’t know what to make of her. Evelyn Waugh told his children to pray for her “because she was a saint.” Frank Kermode said she had “the evil eye.” Bernard Levin put it bluntly: “Had she lived in an earlier century, she would doubtless have been burned at the stake as the witch that she was.”

Wilson, too, fell under her spell. She described writing the book in four months (normally a four-year process) as if in a trance…

–Wilson’s biography of Spark is reviewed by Valerie Sayers in a recent issue of the Jesuit magazine America. Here is an excerpt:

…Newman’s devotion to clear, simple language and to “writing as thinking and thinking as praying” appealed to a writer like Spark whose life had been full of upheaval. Her conversion preceded her own crackup, brought on in Spark’s telling by the Dexedrine she took to diet. Wilson’s account of the breakdown, with its distortions of language and time, is fascinating. By weird coincidence, Evelyn Waugh had during the same period experienced a similar breakdown. As Spark wrote The Comforters, the novel ignited by her experience, Waugh worked on his own autobiographical version, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Waugh’s support for the competition was a crucial boost.

–The Mirror carries a story about TV presenter Clare Balding who recently appeared in the BBC series Celebrity Traitors:

“Filming an episode of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? I discovered [my grandmother’s] father, the MP Sir Malcolm Bullock, was gay. Homosexuality was illegal in his day and it must have caused my grandmother a huge amount of shame.”

During the BBC programme, Clare uncovered that Sir Malcolm, who received the Legion D’Honneur for his exceptional diplomatic service, belonged to an exclusive social set that featured the likes of Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford and John Gielgud.

Evidence of a likely romantic liaison between Sir Malcolm and the painter and theatrical costume designer Rex Whistler, who tragically lost his life during the D-Day offensive in 1944, was unearthed.

The pair were known to dine together frequently and even embarked on a trip to Paris together. However, no love letters between the two men have survived, as such potentially damning evidence would almost certainly have been destroyed given the societal attitudes of the time.

Sir Malcolm had tied the knot with Lady Victoria Primrose, daughter of Edward Stanley, the 17th Earl of Derby, back in 1919, and they had one child together – Clare’s grandmother.

The Malcolm Bullock connection was mentioned in a previous post.

 

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Jilly Cooper (1937-2025) R.I.P.

Posted on October 7, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

British comic novelist Jilly Cooper has died earlier this week. Writer Philip Hensher is among the first to pay his respects. This was published in The Spectator where he offered a thoughtful description of her writings, noting that they fell into two distinct categories:

…The first, a series of shorter, often very charming romances were written in the 1970s. The second is a cycle of 11 wonderfully sprawling novels, from Riders in 1985 to Tackle! in 2023. They are set in roughly the same English rural territory, with excursions to more metropolitan and international settings. Most of them engage with particular professional activities – racing, classical music, schools, football. Characters return in major or minor roles from one novel to the next, just as in Trollope.

After a thoughtful discussion of the two categories, Hensher concludes:

…Most writers disappear quite quickly, despite orchestrated acclaim, sponsorship, the assertions of scholarship and the awards of prizes. The books that last might have surprised the literary community of the day. Barbara Pym survives and Nancy Mitford. 1940s commentators were quick to insist that Evelyn Waugh’s comic novels were ‘poor things’ next to the works of Nigel Balchin.

Cooper’s novels have already lasted astonishingly well. Might it be that their qualities will keep them in place? They are funny; they are inexhaustibly interested in individuals; they are written with an unflagging verve and energy; they have, in spades, what the most high-minded among us have always, mistakenly, deplored in even the greatest of novelists, an appalling degree of vulgarity. Most people loved Dame Jilly in person and freely admitted it. Maybe the time will come when these gloriously pleasurable novels are, rightly, esteemed and read without guilt or apology.

The Daily Telegraph’s obituary contains this description of Jilly from another author who was also a personal friend:

…Anthony Powell’s impression, noted in his diary, was that she was “funny, intelligent (and possessed of a) curious depth of melancholy, one would guess”. When she appeared on a “famous authors” episode of the quiz show The Weakest Link, she proved to be remarkably well-read. She intended to write a “proper novel” one day, she explained, but observed that “if you want to write like George Eliot, you don’t have great big knickerbocker glories of people ending up happily at the end.”

The Times, in addition to a thoughtful and thorough unsigned obituary had a memoir by journalist Caitlin Moran. Here are some excerpts from her description of Jilly’s writings:

Well, I don’t think anyone could worry it was a wasted life. Or a dull one. Decades before anyone coined the phrase “work hard, play hard”, Dame Jilly Cooper, or, as she was then, just plain Jilly Cooper, mother of two, resident in first south London, then the Cotswolds, was an absolute machine for turning out sparkling copy. Thousands of words a day; column after column; book after joyful book. Decades as one of the weekly must-reads in The Sunday Times; 26 non-fiction books; 4 books for children; and 18 novels, 11 of them making up the Rutshire Chronicles.

It is the Chronicles, in which Rutshire is a thinly veiled depiction of her adored Cotswolds, for which Cooper was most famous. These books, Riders, Rivals, Polo et al, singlehandedly invented the British bonkbuster and, I would argue, made the Cotswolds the global hotspot for celebrities they are today. If, as was rumoured last month, Beyonce and Jay-Z are moving there, it’s part of a direct causal chain that began in the mid-1980s with Cooper sitting topless in her garden in the summer (“You might as well get a tan while you write!”) with her typewriter, bashing out Riders and kick-starting the reinvention of the British countryside as somewhere, yes, beautiful, but also as full of intrigue, glamour and scandal as New York or London.

Before Cooper, the Cotswolds were just where, decades before, Laurie Lee had had his ciderous kisses with Rosie. After Cooper’s eye had revealed their late-20th-century reality, they became Britain’s answer to the Hamptons.

And no wonder, because Cooper’s writing was truly addictive. You wanted to know her take on everything. What she’d noticed. Where she’d been. Who she’d heard was shagging whom. If you were a Jilly Cooper fan, it was like she was sending you regular, smart, ludicrously amusing yet constantly well-observed letters on everything: class, love, marriage, motherhood, heartbreak, the trials of Christmas, the joy of the English countryside, champagne, dogs. And sex, of course. Lots of sex. For many women of my generation, teenagers in a time before the internet, Cooper’s bonkbusters were where we learnt about sex: good, bad and frequently hilarious…

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End of the Month Roundup

Posted on September 28, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–Alexander Larman in The Spectator reviews two new books about religion: Twelve Churches by Fergus Butler-Gallie and God, the Science, the Evidence by Miles-Yves BollorĂ© and Olivier Bonnaissies. The article opens with a brief reference to the religious writings of two British authors:

In Philip Larkin’s 1954 poem “Church Going,” the narrator walks into a deserted English country church, and observes that it isn’t up to much. Larkin writes that there is “a tense, musty, unignorable silence/ Brewed God knows how long,” feels a sense of “awkward reverence” and, on the way out, “Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.” It is one of the great vignettes of church-crawling, as the practice is generally known – wandering into an empty ecclesiastical space, not being wildly impressed and strolling out again, unblessed by the visit.

Yet for Larkin, that it will be “A shape less recognizable each week/ A purpose more obscure” is a tragedy, even for a non-believer. Even this second or third-rate building, in his eyes, merits the recognition that “A serious house on serious earth it is,” and the universal desire to embrace religion will be inevitable, “Since someone will forever be surprising/ A hunger in himself to be more serious.” In other words, “the twitch upon the thread,” as Evelyn Waugh wrote of the pull of Catholicism, is more powerful than any carefully (or carelessly) reasoned defense of atheism, even if we are constantly being told that belief in a Judeo-Christian deity is an anachronism and that we should instead embrace Allah, Buddha or Jeff Bezos, depending on our particular view of divinity…

The Spectator article is available here.

–Another article in The Spectator considers  the death of the Great American Novel. This is by Michael P Gibson who, after an obituary of his subject, looks for some hope of a rebirth:

…But while it’s true the mainstream literary beast lies belly-up, gasping for its last breath, something fervent is stirring in the cultural underbrush. There may never be a single novel that dominates conversation at cocktail parties across the nation again, but there are little polities of the mind emerging, building their own canons like medieval monks illuminating manuscripts in hidden scriptoria.

Take the TradCaths. This small but spirited tribe is resurrecting G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, J.R.R. Tolkien and Evelyn Waugh – not American authors, sure, but they will form the foundation of a counter-canon that’s booming in sales of reprints and in homeschool curricula, while the secular slop of literary fiction wheezes on life support. In short, the center cannot hold, but the fringes will flourish. And there is one niche with a strong counter current that interests me most…

The article concludes with this:

…Meanwhile, the established, respected, highbrow world of literature, the gatekeepers to the professions and the petty tyrants of the administrative state read their canon on a sinking Titanic.

The future of American fiction is not in New York’s publishing houses, nor in the pages of the New York Times. It’s tribal and alive in the shadows, where stories are written not for prestige but for truth. It will belong to those who win.

Here’s a link.

–As if in answer to Michael Gibson’s cautious optimism, the New York Times offers a review of a new novel entitled Amanda by H S Cross. Here are the opening paragraphs:

H.S. Cross’s “Amanda” is a historical romance of a grand, old-fashioned and very British variety, with hints of L.P. Hartley, D.H. Lawrence and Evelyn Waugh — an impressive feat for an American author writing many decades after them.

The novel opens in the 1920s with Marion, a mysterious governess in London who is being haunted on several fronts: by her short-lived marriage to a violent man in Ireland that prompted her to flee for a job at a printing press in Oxford; by the loss of her beloved brothers in the trenches of World War I; by “the Talkers” she hears speaking to her inside her head; and, most recently and desperately, by her abrupt defection from Jamie, the upper-class university student she fell in love with while in Oxford. Without him, Marion carries on in “the waiting room that was her life,” facing “the grubby truth, the one that would kill you: She missed him.”…

–Critic and TV presenter Mark Lawson, writing in The Guardian, takes the occasion to note 70 years of outstanding programming on ITV, beginning in 1955 and going to 2025, considering one program each year. The 1981 selection was easy– Brideshead Revisited:

The north-west franchise Granada openly aspired to be a BBC beside the Manchester Ship canal, most provocatively parking its tanks on the lawns of the country house classic adaptation with this 13-part version of Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel about Catholic nobs. From Jeremy Irons’s mournful narration via a cameo from Lord Olivier to the honeyed photography, it terrified the BBC, as planned, and remains among the greatest TV dramas.

The only comparable literary adaptation came a few years later with Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown.

–Finally, a story by Laura Fernandez in the Spanish paper El Pais describes the opening of Spain’s first pet cemetery. Here is the header:

Bury a loved one in Spain’s first pet cemetery.
Founded in 1972 in a small town reminiscent of Ludlow, the setting of Stephen King’s famous novel, this cemetery is named after Evelyn Waugh’s satire about a poet who buries pets: ‘The Loved Ones’

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Summer’s End Roundup

Posted on September 20, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–An article in the New Statesman describes luncheon at the Inner Temple amongst the barristers who frequent the premises. The article is by Finn McRedmond and concludes with this:

…And so, here I am eating my greens in Inner Temple, on a geographic and spiritual vacation from reality. I am metres away from Fleet Street. But it is peaceful and clean, and there are no Superdrugs or Holland & Barretts disrupting the view. It is technically a place of work, but with its quads and Georgian-ish buildings and chandeliered dining rooms, it is drawn more from the imagination of Evelyn Waugh than the HR department at Deloitte.

But it is not just a warm bath for Old Harrovians. It’s aspic for a political moment long lost to us. The legal profession was meant to have changed: Keir Starmer (son of a toolmaker, etc) is now the most famous barrister in the country; Jolyon Maugham, before he beat a fox to death, represented the new lefty-activist class; more than 100 members of the barrister-lobby in 2023 unionised against prosecuting climate protesters, and aren’t they supposed to be using the ECHR to crush right-wing Britain?

The paradigmatic Tory in a gown and wig was supposed to have been replaced by a young woman with an X account and spare keffiyeh. I don’t detect much of that energy in the canteen – these people eat like the most right-wing people in Britain. Bathed in custard, longing for Mummy.

–The Independent has an obituary of Nona Summers, journalist, party goer and sometimes addict. This is by Joan Juliet Buck who describes her subject as “The Gypsy of Chelsea”. Here is an excerpt;

…Born to Austrian parents, Nona was more like Mrs Stitch in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, the society lady of “dazzling, inebriating charm” who drives her little car down the stairs of the men’s lavatory on Sloane Street; or Lady Pauline Leone in Nancy Mitford’s Don’t Tell Alfred, who refuses to vacate the British Embassy residence when her husband’s turn is up. Both Waugh’s Mrs Stitch and Mitford’s Lady Leone were based on Lady Diana Cooper (nĂ©e Lady Diana Manners, 1892).

However, Nona’s aristocratic disregard for rules did not mean she was an aristocrat. Her mother, Fritzi, had fled Austria after the Anschluss and was so intent on the royal flush she’d been dealt in a poker game that legend has it she gave birth under the card table, naming the baby Nona because she was born on 9 March…

–In the website Jericho Writers, Harry Bingham considers opening passages of novels and how they might or might not succeed in a reader’s engagement in the book in question. Here’s the concluding passage:

…As for the too little, too little observation: there I want to say that some openings don’t do enough to gesture at the story that’s to come. They offer a Dramatic Incident, yes, but that Dramatic Incident doesn’t really do enough to guide me as to the shape of what’s to come.

And all this sounds complex, but it’s easy enough to do. Here, for not much reason except that the novel was to hand, is the opening of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:

When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning. We were leaving that day. When we marched in, three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding. I had reflected then that, whatever scenes of desolation lay ahead of us, I never feared one more brutal than this, and I reflected now that it had no single happy memory for me.

Here love had died between me and the army.

As the prologue continues, we learn that the narrator is a captain in the British Army of the Second World War. He’s about to move out of a Scottish training camp with his men.

That’s the bare situation and, yes, it’s interesting enough to sustain us and, yes, small enough that we don’t feel overcrowded by too much story too soon.

But look at those underlinings.

“Paused and looked back”: this whole book is a looking back, a reminiscence. Any novel written in the past tense is, technically, a reminiscence, but BR revels in its nostalgic gaze – makes a feature of it. (The time-of-war narrator looking back at his time-of-peace past emphasises the change in the world between Then and Now.)

“No single happy memory 
 loved had died”: this tells us that there’s a love story here, but an unhappy one, a failure.

That sounds rather bleak: why would you fork out for a book that’s all set to depress you? Except that I think there’s one more bit of (really lovely) foreshadowing which complicates that simple story. Because Waugh also says, “three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding.” That’s not a movement from happy to bleak; it’s the exact opposite.

So Waugh has given us two contradictory messages here. The most overt one is, “This is going to be a very bleak love story, with plenty of reminiscence.” But the secondary, almost hidden one is, “this is a story of growth, and bloom, and hope, and life.”

And, darn it, but that’s exactly what this book is: a sad love story (Ryder + Sebastian, and also Ryder + Julia) but also a very hopeful one (Ryder + God.)

Now, I wouldn’t suggest that writing a sad love story about God is a brilliant way to make sales in the 21st century, but your story is what it is. Foreshadow that. Do it with wit. Do it obliquely. Do it with a sentence. Do it with an image. But do it gently. Don’t break the plant that hasn’t yet put down roots.

Got that? Good. Now execute.

–Forum Auctions is selling two Waugh first editions that might be of interest. A first with dust wrapper of Brideshead Revisited. It is not stated whether this is the Book Club or publisher edition which were issued at the same time; the dust wrapper says Chapman and Hall. The other is a first large paper edition (limited to 50 copies) of a signed copy of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, dedicated to a Miss O’Donnell. The seller offers this comment: “Inscribed to Miss O’Donnell – probably wife of Donat O’Donnell who heavily criticised Waugh’s novel in the July 1957 issue of The Spectator – as an unsuccessful gesture of reconciliation or flattery on Waugh’s part.” These are designated Lots 113 and 114. The auction is scheduled for 25 September at 1pm. Here’s a link for details.

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Mid-September Roundup

Posted on September 14, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–A post on the website UnHerd.com seems to have been inspired by the recent book of Eleanor Doughty on the British aristocracy Heirs and Graces. This has been mentioned in several previous posts. The article is written by Pratinav Anil and is entitled “Britain is a nation of flunkies.” Here is an excerpt:

…The interwar years found the aristos properly on the skids, with huge tracts of land sold off. Brideshead Revisited is in great part a whinge about precisely this. In the postwar period, Manny Shinwell, minister of fuel and power and unreconstructed class warrior, pulled the aristocracy down another peg. He requisitioned Wentworth, that preposterous estate of some 365 rooms where guests were issued confetti to mark their trail back to bed Ă  la Hansel and Gretel, and had it torn open for an opencast coal mine. Rhododendrons and holly trees fell like nine-pins before the ripper shanks…

The full article is available here.

–An article in the “Artillery Row” column of The Critic magazine discusses recent changes in the BBC’s programming policies. This is by Niall Gooch and is entitled “A Lot to Bragg About.” He notes particularly the discontinuance of Melvin Bragg’s long running Radio 4 program In Our Time. The article begins with this:

When Evelyn Waugh was divorcing his first wife Evelyn Gardner in 1929, the name of Sir John Heygate was cited in the court proceedings, Gardner having left Waugh for the young baronet. At the time, Heygate was employed by the BBC, and was required to resign, on the grounds that his involvement in the divorce might damage the reputation of the fledgling Corporation. To most modern people, this incident will seem at best quaint, and at worst morally outrageous. Conceivably they are right.

But the distaste for adultery does reflect a deep and admirable sense of purpose and worthiness that characterised the BBC from its very earliest days. “Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation”, the official motto adopted in 1927, is not a direct quotation from the Bible, but it certainly sounds like one, given its sonorous rhythm and grand idealism (maybe that is why it is so rarely heard nowadays). The idea was that the new technologies of radio — and later television — could be used to spread knowledge, understanding and virtue across Britain and the wider world, unsullied by vulgar commercial considerations. John Reith, the first Director-General, famously disliked the advertising-led free-for-all of interwar American radio…

[P]erhaps the outstanding example of pure public service broadcasting is In Our Time, a fixture of Thursday mornings on Radio 4 for 27 years, in which three academics discuss their subject for forty-five minutes, with Melvyn Bragg on hand to prod, interject and keep them on topic. It was one of the first BBC radio shows to be made available as a podcast — this was very helpful for those of us who usually had somewhere else to be at 9 o’clock on a Thursday morning, and hardly surprising, because it was really a podcast avant la lettre, with its simple format of host plus experts. The subjects covered are self-consciously eclectic; recent instalments have covered Dragons, The Evolution Of Lungs, Moliere, and Pollination. I have a distinct memory, from many years ago, of gradually waking from a deep alcohol-induced sleep to realise that I was listening to a delightful woman from Oxford talk about The Fisher King, a mysterious figure from medieval mythology, and hence that I was catastrophically late for work.

A full text of the article is posted here.

–The latest issue of the journal Foreign Policy has an article by Edward Lucas entitled “The Perils of Irresponsible Reporting of Russia’s War.” Here’s the opening:

Discussions of irresponsible media coverage often lead to the fictional character of Wenlock Jakes. Supposedly the “highest paid journalist of the United States,” this infamous figure features in Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel, Scoop, the classic satire of editorial egos and reportorial incompetence. Jakes is hugely influential, despite—or because of—his loose grasp of facts.

Jakes’s misreporting changes the course of history. Having overslept on a train in the Balkans, he gets out in the wrong country. Undaunted by such minor inconveniences, he files a colorful, made-up dispatch, featuring every cliche of his trade: “barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the deserted roadway below his window.”…

—America: The Jesuit Review has an article by Katy Carl who sees coming another  “Revival” of Roman Catholic literature. Here is her identification of three previous examples:

… There have been at least three major waves, and they have tended to travel westward.

The first, which took hold in France, flourished from the early decades of the 20th century through the Second World War and succeeded in giving us major influences such as Mauriac, the Maritains, Bernanos, Bloy, Peguy and Claudel. The second flourished in England in the interwar period—the 1930s and ’40s—and featured writers as different as Caryll Houselander (who published in modest numbers with the confessionally Catholic house Sheed & Ward), Evelyn Waugh (who took the mainstream by storm) and Graham Greene (notorious good-bad boy and self-hating Catholic who loved to push the envelope with readers, whether they were believers or not). The Inklings are no doubt also part of this U.K.-based second wave but are best understood on their own terms, rather than on standard terms of literary convention.

The third wave, which began to rise in the United States around the end of World War II, is the “revival” most American readers have in mind when referring to Catholic literary work. It encompasses the American writers we in the United States tend to have heard the most about—Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy—as well as minor but important figures who are often forgotten, like Caroline Gordon, Betty Wahl, Edwin O’Connor and J. F. Powers. Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, both lapsed Catholics, have an underexplored relationship to this third revival, whose relationship to the mainstream of 20th-century American literature is in turn less well understood than it might be…

The full article is available here.

 

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Early September Roundup

Posted on September 7, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–The online journal American Thinker has posted an article by Lars MĂžller entitled “Evelyn Waugh’s England: A Lament for a Lost World”. Here are the opening paragraphs:

In the mid-twentieth century, the English novelist Evelyn Waugh chronicled, with elegance and melancholy, a world slipping away. His novels, particularly Brideshead Revisited, portray a vision of England rooted in tradition, faith, hierarchy, and cultural refinement — a civilization with the Church at its center, the aristocracy as its stewards, and classical education as its soul.

Today, that England is all but gone. In its place stands a nation that is multicultural, secular (albeit increasingly Islamic), and globalized — a country that has reimagined itself as a bastion of diversity and liberal democracy. For some, this transformation represents progress; for others, it marks a rupture with the spiritual and cultural coherence that once defined the British identity. Waugh’s lament goes beyond changing customs; it is also about a profound civilizational shift — the loss of a unifying narrative, the decline of intellectual and religious sophistication, and the disappearance of belonging rooted in place, faith, and history…

The entire article can be read or listened to at this link. No subscription is required.

–Aaron Bastani has an article in a recent Daily Telegraph in which he considers novelists based on their political inclinations. This in entitled “I’m a Marxist but I mourn the loss of the conservative novelist.” As a Marxist, he first goes through the leftist catalogue, and then he turns to the conservatives. Here’s an excerpt:

… it is conservative writers – absent of a didactic agenda – who feel most at ease in the complicated world of human intention. This became especially clear to me while reading Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. More than simply bringing the Second World War to life, Waugh’s semi-autobiographical tale offers a human perspective with which I was unacquainted.

Guy Crouchback, the story’s protagonist, gradually realises he is a man at odds with the direction of the war, and indeed history. He regards his initial crusading views about Britain’s involvement as naive, and concludes that moral impulses can only be expressed in personal acts of kindness rather than through military conquest. Reading it completely challenged how I understood the period, and the views of at least some who participated in it…

–This Literary Review has posted a  review of Eleanor Doughty’s new book Heirs and Graces that was mentioned previously. This is by Richard Davenport-Hines and is entitled “Brideshead Repurposed.” Here is the opening paragraph:

A hereditary peer, when approached by Eleanor Doughty for an interview during the preparation of this book, accused her of being an agent of the deep state. Far from it. She is a Daily Telegraph journalist, although more eirenic and jocular than many of her colleagues. She has no wish, in writing a history of the British nobility since 1945, to shake foundations or to cause offence. It is evident that she admires the repose that stamps the caste of Vere de Vere. Heirs and Graces is a friendly, forgiving, good-spirited book which celebrates the adaptability, the fortitude, the oddness, the forbearance, the anger and the spite of the coronet class. Every page shows how much she likes other people. The congenial frankness she elicits from her many interviewees is winning. She finds charm in stubborn stupidity, and takes Madame de StaĂ«l’s line tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner when confronted by merciless acquisitiveness or the havoc caused by misused vitality…

—The Times has also reviewed Doughty’s book. This is written by Alwin Turner and entitled “It’s tuff being a toff…”. Here’s an excerpt:

…The country house was part of Britain’s sense of itself. It was, said Evelyn Waugh, “our chief national artistic achievement”, and if few survive as family homes, the image remains embedded  in popular culture, from Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, to Downton Abbey, via Waugh’s own Brideshead Revisited…

–Finally, The Spectator has posted a short list of good but accessible boarding schools. This includes Lancing, Waugh’s alma mater. There is also an aerial photo of the school which gives a good perspective of its surroundings. Here’s a link:

Lancing is a public boarding school for children aged 13 to 18 in West Sussex. Set within the South Downs National Park, it offers an open-air theatre, a state-of-the-art music school, an equestrian centre and even the tallest school chapel in the world. As impressive as its facilities, though, are its alumni: Evelyn Waugh, Sir David Hare and Lord (Stephen) Green to name but a few. Nowadays, many students at the college – where fees start from £12,602 – come from its sister preparatory schools in Hove and Worthing. Also arriving this month is a new headteacher, Dr Scott Crawford, who will replace Dominic Oliver after 11 years. Dr Crawford, who was previously deputy headteacher at Magdalen College School in Oxford, says he is ‘thrilled to join a school that embraces both tradition and modernity’.

It is perhaps no coincidence that nearby on the Google search there appears a link to Duncan McLaren’s description of Waugh’s Lancing school days. This was earlier posted as part of Duncan’s online biography of Waugh and is, as usual, recommended reading. It is available at this link and is also accompanied by excellent photographic support.

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