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 EugĂšne 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 ÂŁ250 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, 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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