BBC Marks 60th Anniversary of Waugh’s Death

Posted on February 14, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

The BBC has recently posted schedules of several upcoming programs that appear to mark its recognition of Waugh’s death 60 years ago in 1966. Most prominently it has commissioned Russell Kane to record commentaries on 7 of Waugh’s books. These will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 starting 2 March. The series is entitled “Waugh: What’s He Good For?” Here is their description:

Many people hold Evelyn Waugh among the best British writers of the 20th Century -Russell Kane is one of them. To mark the 60th anniversary of his death, Russell delves into seven of Waugh’s most important works.

While Waugh has been unfashionable for some time, Kane believes it’s high time to turn back to him. He says he was way ahead of his time and, in his books, he reveals ourselves to ourselves and uncovers clues for how we should live our lives today.

Over seven episodes, Waugh tells us everything we need to know about the cluttered corridors of English culture – its class system, media, cult of masculinity, colonial hang-ups: everything it’s made of, good and bad. Not only does Waugh show our society for what it is, but he demonstrates how it can be hacked – infiltrated by savvy interlopers like himself. And Russell sees a kindred spirit.

Waugh may be a divisive figure, with the public reputation of a pantomime villain. Some say Waugh’s vitriolic streak, cultural insensitivity and idolisation of the upper classes should condemn him to the male, pale and stale literary past – but Russell believes he is prescient, not reactionary, that he was ahead of his time. Waugh holds the least flattering of mirrors up to us – and actually, it’s not Waugh but what we see that we don’t like.

In episode 1, we turn the pages of Decline And Fall (1928) – a book about social mobility. Russell knows what it’s like to be dropped into a social milieu to which you don’t belong. The novel is clever, depicting an array of characters from different backgrounds who all want to join a party they’re not invited to – and none of them behave as they ought. How do you penetrate what it’s vulgar to aspire to, and what do you do when you leave your background behind?

The details are available at this link.

On the same day there will be a rebroadcast of a 1990 production of Waugh’s novel The Loved One. This will also appear on BBC Radio 4 and will consist of three 30 minute episodes. Here’s a decription:

Hollywood, 1947. Failed poet/screenwriter Dennis Barlow has disgraced the English community by taking a job in a pets’ cemetery.

He is given the chance to redeem himself by arranging a colleague’s funeral, but love rather than redemption looms at the Whispering Glades Funeral Home.

Starring Rupert Graves as Dennis Barlow and Miranda Richardson as Aimee Thanatogenous.

Evelyn Waugh’s 1948 satire on the American way of death, adapted in three episodes by Bill Matthews.

Dennis Barlow …. Rupert Graves
Aimee Thanatogenous …. Miranda Richardson
Sir Ambrose Abercrombie …. Donald Pickering
Sir Francis Hinsley …. Ronald Fraser
Baumbein …. Bob Sessions
Mrs Heinkel …. Lorelei King
Mr Heinkel …. Garrick Hagon
Mr Schultz …. Graham Hoadly
Came …. Elizabeth Mansfield
Erikson …. Simon Treves
Schindler …. David Bannerman

Producer: Lissa Evans

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in October 1990.

Information is available here.

Finally, there will be a rebroadcast of a 1953 interview of Waugh by three BBC reporters. This interview was part of a series called “Frankly Speaking.”  It had important ramifications for Waugh’s future writing as was reflected in his novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold as described in the BBC’s notice:

Brideshead Revisited author Evelyn Waugh is grilled about his life and career by a panel of three:

* Charles Wilmot
* Jack Davies
* Stephen Black

Regarded as one of the most brilliant novelists of his day, Waugh loathed the BBC.

His grandson Alexander believes that this interview, along with a cocktail of sleeping draughts, helped to send him “rather mad”. The author later turned his experience on Frankly Speaking into a scene in his novel ‘The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold’ with Stephen Black becoming the character Angel who haunts Pinfold in his hallucinations.

Launched in 1952 on the BBC Home Service, Frankly Speaking was a novel, ground breaking series. Unrehearsed and unscripted, the traditional interviewee/interviewer pairing was initially jettisoned for three interviewers firing direct questions – straight to the point.

Early critics described it as ‘unkempt’, ‘an inquisition’ and described the guest as prey being cornered, quarry being pursued – with calls to axe the unscripted interview. But the format won out and eventually won over its detractors.

Unknown or very inexperienced broadcasters were employed as interviewers, notably John Freeman, John Betjeman, Malcolm Muggeridge, Harold Hobson, Penelope Mortimer, Elizabeth Beresford and Katherine Whitehorn.

Only about 40 of the original 100 programmes survive.

First broadcast on the BBC Home Service in November 1953.

The rebroadcast will be on BBC Radio 4 Extra, 28 Feb 2026. Details appear at this link.

 

 

 

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Latest Issue of EWS Is Posted

Posted on February 12, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

Jamie Collinson has posted the latest issue of the Evelyn Waugh Studies (No. 56.2). Here’s his description:

Edition 56.2 of Evelyn Waugh Studies is now available for your reading pleasure. Within, Jeffrey Manley reviews Lady Pamela Berry: Passion, Politics and Power, by Harriet Cullen. Berry was an English socialite and member of the Bright Young Things, and had a long running acquaintance with Waugh.

While Manley finds some worrying omissions in the book’s sources, there is a great deal here to fascinate Waugh fans. One of my own favourite Waugh stories involves a panic over the theft of his gold watch amid an insalubrious party, and I had forgotten that Berry played a key role in this vignette – and its reporting in the press. The book features Cambridge spies, Anthony Powell, disastrous holidays, sabotaged Alec Guinness performances, and our old friend Randolph Churchill. Fill your boots.

This edition’s news section is particularly entertaining and wide ranging. The John H. Wilson Jr. Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest is once again open for submissions; Father Gerard Garrigan has written a new poem inspired by Graham Greene; a bookseller has contacted the EWS with an intriguing (and bargainous) copy of Waugh’s Knox biography; Robert Harris reveals a writing credo based on a Waugh quote; and I for one learned that Irvine Welsh took inspiration as much from Evelyn Waugh as he did Acid House music.

 

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Spectator Compares Waugh Novel to Current BBC Series

Posted on February 9, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

The Spectator  has an article by Alexander Larman in which he compares the current BBC drama series Industry to Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. Given the contents of Industry, which follows the careers of several young characters working at a London investment bank, this seems something of a stretch. As it turns out, it is the satire and not the story that Larman finds comparable. This is suggested in the title: “Is ‘Industry’ the ‘Brideshead Revisited’ of our times? The BBC show is as satirical as Evelyn Waugh.” Here’s the opening paragraph:

At first glance, there are few similarities between Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh’s classic 1945 novel – later adapted into an equally classic ITV series – of prelapsarian bliss in Oxford and Industry, the BBC’s adrenaline-fuelled show that exposes the dark iniquity at the heart of the financial industry. The one is a languid examination of (discreetly portrayed) same-sex love and Catholic guilt, and the other is a profane, sexually charged and palpitation-inducing dive into hedonistic self-indulgence. Brideshead is plover’s eggs and Meursault; Industry class A drugs and group sex. They would seem as distinct from one another as chalk and (Comté) cheese…

Larman then proceeds to state his case for the similarities between the two satirical presentations. This is well worth reading and makes his case for similarity very well. It concludes with this:

…If Evelyn Waugh could be raised from the dead and put in front of a television set to be shown what his distant descendants have come up with, he would probably harrumph and mutter something about how disgusting it all is. He would not be wrong. Yet if Waugh’s initial disdain for the show could be overcome, he would surely see that Industry is the natural rejection of the veneration for all things traditional and English that Brideshead epitomised. In that book’s case, it was Catholicism that led to ‘the twitch upon the thread’, whereas in the later show, it is money, filthy and horribly desirable, that lies at the heart of the moral decay all its characters are plunged headlong into.

Will it end well for any of them? I doubt it, but that’s why it’s so disgustingly watchable. ‘I had been there before; I knew all about it’, Waugh’s protagonist Charles Ryder muses when he, quite literally, revisits Brideshead. Those revisiting the world of banking know all about it, too, and plunge headlong into debauchery, immersing themselves in the gutter while the stars twinkle sadly a long, long way away.

The complete article is available here. Episode 5 of Series 4 is broadcast today on BBC One and will be available (along with all episodes of this and previous series) on BBC iPlayer thereafter. It is also available in North America on HBO.

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Roundup: Waugh Widely Cited in London Papers

Posted on February 8, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

—-A novel by Duff Cooper (husband of Waugh’s friend Diana Mitford) was briefly noted in a recent issue of Evening Standard. This novel has been reissued in the Penguin Classics series. The notice is by Melanie McDonagh. Here’s an excerpt:

Operation Mincemeat is one of the better known operations of the Second World War, thanks to the film of the same name which was turned into an improbable musical. It caught the imagination because it was so very macabre: the body of a British officer would be found washed up near the coast of Spain bearing details of an intended action in Greece and Sardinia — to distract attention from the real operation, the liberation of Sicily…

This was the scenario for Operation Heartbreak, the only novel of Duff Cooper, best known as the husband of the beautiful Lady Diana Cooper, to whom he was consistently unfaithful, a persecutor of PG Wodehouse and Tory politician. …The story is briskly told but with the unconscious insight and detail that you get from inhabiting the time and place in which the novel is situated. It doesn’t match Evelyn Waugh’s work of the period — you don’t feel that we lost a great novelist in Cooper — but it’s poignant and moving, all the more for being adjacent to reality.

Waugh and Duff Cooper kept their distance from each other but that didn’t keep Cooper from admiring Waugh’s writing style sufficiently to try to copy it.

–The Daily (or perhaps Sunday) Telegraph has a story about foreign relations between the UK and Canada. These remind the author (David Blair) of a Waugh novel:

…It seems incredible now, but British Foreign Secretaries used to mount “campaigns” on subjects like media freedom, religious liberty, wildlife conservation and sexual violence, as if countering Russian aggression and Chinese ambitions for global power were not enough to fill their time.

They would call conferences on these issues and drum up attendance by striking preposterous deals with their counterparts: if you come to my event, I’ll attend yours. Listening to these phone calls, I would silently recite the words of Julia Stitch in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop: “Why would I go to Viola Chasm’s Distressed Area party; did she come to my Model Madhouse?”…

…That novel comes up again in a Guardian profile of author Nussaibah Younis:

The book that made me want to be a writer

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh is a brilliantly funny satire of war journalism that still rings disturbingly true. It inspired me to write a comedy about a bonkers UN programme in Iraq – which turned into my debut novel, Fundamentally.

The same writer also mentions the novel in a recent article in The Times (2 February 2026) where she is asked to name her favorite book by a dead writer:

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. In this brilliant satire of war journalism, the nature columnist William Boot is accidentally sent to cover “a very promising little war” in the fictional east African state of Ishmaelia. I read it after spending the best part of ten years wandering around the Middle East trying and failing to “build peace” and I related hard to Waugh’s hapless and naive protagonist as he encounters an industry more cynical and mercurial than he could have imagined.

Waugh perfectly depicts the absurdities of westerners utterly out of their depth in foreign war zones and, despite being published in 1938, it still rings disturbingly true to this day. Even the cringeworthy racism of the book is not a million miles off from the way British aid workers and journalists still talk about the foreign countries they exploit for a living, and end up resenting. For anyone interested in satire, war journalism or the long tradition of Brits being idiots abroad, it’s a foundational read.

—The Times also has an article by Ed Potton about film-maker Emerald Fennell and her latest production, Wuthering Heights:

…she turned up the outrageousness further in Saltburn (2023), a twisted mash-up of Brideshead Revisited and The Talented Mr Ripley with extra smut in which Barry Keoghan’s lower-class interloper Oliver Quick became obsessed with his fellow Oxford undergrad, the blithe toff Felix (Jacob Elordi). Oliver danced naked through a mansion to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Murder on the Dancefloor, drank Felix’s semen-laced bathwater and humped his love object’s burial mound, while Evelyn Waugh spun in his grave. That last scene, Fennell has said, was “sort of inspired” by Wuthering Heights, in which Heathcliff digs up Cathy’s grave, twice.

She was an “incredible” director on Saltburn, [actor in that film Richard E.] Grant says. “Her jolly-hockey-sticks voice beguiles you into thinking that you’re in for a St Trinian’s escapade, but her dark sensibility skewers that with her unflinching examination of class and sexual obsession. After winning an Oscar, mothering two children under the age of five, leading a crew of 150 and a large cast, she wore her authority very lightly.”…

Waugh’s novel comes up again in a later discussion of Fennell’s education:

…She read English at Greyfriars, the Catholic friary that was at the time a private hall of the University of Oxford, indulging a “Brideshead fetish” by striding about in Thirties-style men’s trousers and braces. Affected play-acting like that fed directly into Saltburn, she has said. “So much of everything I make is me trying to come to terms with what an embarrassing person I am.”…

–Finally, The Times had another story that featured Waugh’s novel. This is in an article by Jack Blackburn on a current exhibit at London Archives. The topic of the exhibit is “History of London’s Outlaws”).

Modern policing had different concerns from highwaymen and the like. The exhibition runs into the 1920s, with the story of Kate Meyrick, the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh’s Ma Mayfied in Brideshead Revisited, who ran numerous illicit nightclubs and was sent to prison for breaking licensing laws.

Was this a censorious incident in a post-war age where there was an appetite for fun? Or the dawning of a more sensible age of regulation?

A handsome photo (probably from the exhibit) accompanies the article. Here’s a link.

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Allan Massie (16 October 1938 – 3 February 2026) R.I.P.

Posted on February 4, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

Novelist and journalist Allan Massie has died earlier this week. Among his obituaries, several mention a connection of his early fictional works with those of Evelyn Waugh. His son Alexander Massie writes:

…His novels … ranged widely. He began with comedies of manners – very much in the school of Evelyn Waugh – but his chief interests were political and historical. He believed writing was a form of carpentry: style could be important but function trumped form. He disliked mannered or overly-perfumed prose and his own style was clipped and epigrammatic. “I am a dandy who can no longer be bothered to dress” was the arresting – to my mind – first line of “The Death of Men”, his roman a clef about the kidnapping of Aldo Moro.

The Times elaborates the point somewhat:

…The first of his 20 novels, Change and Decay in All Around I See, an Evelyn Waugh-style comedy, appeared in 1978, closely followed by The Last Peacock, a comedy of manners. But it was his third, The Death of Men, based on the kidnapping and murder of the Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro, that won him critical attention, with Encounter magazine describing him as “perhaps the finest living Scottish author”. The book won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award.

Finally, the Daily Telegraph indirectly elaborates this connection:

…In 1976 he began to review fiction …. After several false starts he completed and published his first novel, Change and Decay in All Around I See (1978), which he later described as “a somewhat scrappy comedy of low life in London”. He was pleased at the time with a party scene that lasted for several pages with all the dialogue left unattributed, but later came to regard such feats of ingenuity as rather pointless.

All three of the obituaries cited and linked above are worth reading. You will also find numerous references to Waugh and his work by searching “Allan Massie” in EWS News.

 

 

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Two Interesting Waugh Articles

Posted on February 2, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

On the same day late last week, two interesting and provocative articles were posted, both of which revolve around Waugh and his fictional characters. The first is entitled “Waugh Warned Us”. It was written by Paul Bauman and appeared in the religious/political magazine Commonweal. Here’s an excerpt from the opening paragraphs:

…In trying to make sense of [Donald] Trump’s preposterous and perilous ascendency, I have at last come to the realization that it bears an uncanny resemblance to the career of Rex Mottram, the ambitious businessman, playboy, and opportunistic British politician in Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. Mottram’s political cynicism, like Trump’s, recalls Henry Adams’s famous description of democratic politics as “the systematic organization of hatreds.”

The article then continues with what appears to be a fairly exhaustive and lively comparison of how closely Waugh’s character from the 1930-40s comes to resemble today’s American politician. The closing is quoted in full below:

…When the revelation of Mottram’s earlier marriage and divorce prevents his Catholic marriage to Julia, he sounds exactly like Trump in thinking that every problem has a financial solution. “All right then, I’ll get an annulment,” he declares. “What does it cost? Who do I get it from?”

“You know Father Mowbray hit on the truth about Rex at once, that it took me a year of marriage to see,” Julia tells Ryder.

“He simply wasn’t all there. He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.“

And now his doppelganger sits in the White House, counting his gold, gilding his walls, and subjecting the rest of us to his stunted vision of the world.

Like all great novelists, Waugh saw clearly an aspect of the future hidden from most of his contemporaries. Eighty years ago, in a moment of great triumph for liberal democracy, he understood the dangers of casting aside the past and every traditional moral sentiment in pursuit of fame and fortune. He warned about a future where every difficult question will be answered with a snort: “Quiet, Piggy!” He warned us not to give the Rex Mottrams of the world our attention, or our votes.

The complete article is available here and is well worth reading.

The other article is somewhat shorter but equally interesting. It is written by Dwight Longenecker and appears in yet another religious/political journal, The Imaginative Conservative. It compares another character from Brideshead Revisited to a character in a roughly contemporary American novel. The article is entitled “Nick Carraway and Charles Ryder: Characters of Delusion and Decadence”.  Here are the introduction and opening paragraphs:

One comes away from both F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” with an acute sense of the emptiness of the jazz age and the despair at the heart of all our delusions and decadence. One also can’t help but compare the lives of the authors themselves.

On re-reading The Great Gatsby (thanks to Ignatius Press’ newly published critical edition) and meeting again F. Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway, I couldn’t help being reminded of that other observer of delusion and decadence: Evelyn Waugh’s Charles Ryder.

Carraway—a simple bond salesman from the midwest is drawn into the glittering world of the seemingly sophisticated socialite Jay Gatsby. Charles Ryder—a modest Oxford student is drawn into the opulent champagne and strawberries world of Lord Sebastian Flyte. Both stories unfold in a sumptuous setting: Gatsby’s fantastic mansion in West Egg and Brideshead Castle—the ancestral pile of the Marquess of Marchmain. Carraway observes the decadence of 1920s American “new money,” while Ryder is drawn into the decay of 1920s English “old money”. Whether the money is old or new, and the characters archaic or parvenu, the delusion and decadence compare…

There follows a brief, well-written comparison of the two characters and a discussion of their historical significance. The article concludes with this:

…Waugh manages his moral neatly with a poetic “twitch of the thread”. Where Fitzgerald fails Waugh succeeds by placing a beacon of hope at the end of his tale: the darkened chapel heavy with incense and the flame of the sanctuary lamp re-lit before the beaten copper doors of the tabernacle.

As with the earlier article, this one is available on the internet and well worth reading in full.

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End of January Roundup

Posted on January 29, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

–A Scottish blogger, posting on Hole Ousia, has expressed his admiration for Waugh’s Diaries. Here’s his discussion of selections from the diaries which he has recently read:

I recently read ‘The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh‘ as edited by Michael Davie. What is shared below is a small selection of entries, often partial, which do not present the whole. I am interested in Evelyn Waugh for his writing [his art] and have read much of his work.

As a retired doctor I find that I also have some interest in the life he led which, it is fair to say, was anything but healthy: his excessive drinking and the powerful drugs prescribed for him cannot be ignored. I have no wish to  focus on this, particularly as my view is that the discipline of ‘pathography‘ has inherent difficulties.  Most important of these difficulties are that the subject is dead and the world that they lived in has passed.

Whilst it is tempting to ‘diagnose’ in retrospect, such a ‘pathological lens’ fails to see a much wider bigger, necessary, picture that it is impossible to capture.

The text of his discussion may be read on his website.

—The Times has an article by Oliver Berry who recommends 16 of the most romantic locations for short city-break visits in England which rival competing foreign sites. Number 10 is Oxford and here is his description of its possibilities:

Oxford is littered with literary love stories, from the doomed passion of Charles and Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited to the heart-rendingly sad conclusion of Lyra and Will’s story in His Dark Materials. Much of Evelyn Waugh’s novel is set in and around the grounds of Merton College, while the Botanical Gardens provide the location for the devastating denouement of The Amber Spyglass. Magdalen College’s Addison’s Walk, where many of the city’s most famous writers (including Tolkien, CS Lewis and TE Lawrence) wandered for inspiration, is a romantic spot for a stroll — and, for the best view, head to the spire of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin on the High Street. A former rectory surrounded by gardens, the Old Parsonage Hotel feels like quintessential Oxford — but inside it’s more Scandi-chic than olde England, with sleek rooms, an upmarket restaurant and Velorbis bikes to borrow.

The emphasis in Waugh’s novel was more Hertford College and Christ Church than Merton but since they are rather clustered together and within easy walking distance, these could also easily be included in a brief visit.

–An article in the Oxford paper Cherwell also mentions Waugh. This is by Tarana Varma and is entitled “Why you should talk to your scout more.” Here is an excerpt:

…The Oxford cohort of the 19th and early 20th century was almost entirely made up of men from the landed gentry and clergy; it was therefore necessary that the services provided by the University matched those that these young men had been accustomed to during their childhood. Cultural depictions of Oxford life before the 21st century, such as in Evelyn Waugh’s classic Oxford novel Brideshead Revisited, show these men in all their self-assurance, lording it over the menial labourers who are so clearly seen as belonging to a different world. Luckily, most of us have now moved away from such reprehensible treatment of those who work for our colleges, and from such discreditable attitudes towards class division. Do we then have nothing to learn from the past as regards the university’s workforce?

–Journalist Hannah Betts, who has previously expressed her admiration of Evelyn Waugh’s work, has recently chosen Handful of Dust as one of the 20 best books about love affairs. The selection appears in a story in this week’s Sunday Telegraph. Although her full article is not posted on the internet, her selection of Waugh’s novel is evident from the Telegraph’s promotional material which mentions the novel by title and refers to “Dull, obvious Tony Last…” Betts is also mentioned in previous posts as an admirer of Brideshead Revisited, which along with Handful features an affair as important theme.

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New Academic Study of Waugh Issued

Posted on January 24, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

Bloomsbury Publishing has announced the publication of a new academic study of Waugh. This is entitled Evelyn Waugh’s Exterior Modernism: Cinema, Satire, Comedy and is written by Waugh Society member and co-editor of Evelyn Waugh Studies, Yuexi Liu. Here are the publisher’s description and the Table of Contents:

“Drawing on literary manuscripts and the history of cinema, Evelyn Waugh’s Exterior Modernism examines systematically for the first time Waugh’s relationship with cinema in the context of modernism, a relationship crucial to the emergence and development of his strand of modernism.
The term ‘exterior modernism’ refers to the work of a group of younger writers, such as Evelyn Waugh, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Green, Christopher Isherwood, Anthony Powell, Elizabeth Bowen, and Patrick Hamilton, whose departure from high modernism took the form of an ‘outward turn’ privileging exteriority over the interiority of consciousness through foregrounding talk and drawing on cinema, comedy, and satire. Relating to other exterior modernists, Evelyn Waugh’s Exterior Modernism focuses on Waugh by way of exemplification, considering his oeuvre, non-fiction as well as fiction. To illuminate Waugh’s exteriority, Yuexi Liu develops an interdisciplinary framework, informed primarily by distributed cognition.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction Exterior Modernist: The Outward Turn

1. ‘In my beginning is my end’: ‘The Balance’ and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

2. Cinema, Comedy, and Satire: Decline and Fall as a Chaplinesque Silent Film

3. Talk Fiction and the Group Novel: Vile Bodies as the Group Novel

4. Waugh’s Heritage: Brideshead Revisited and Adaptation

Conclusion: ‘In my end is my beginning’

Bibliography

The book is available 5 February in the UK in both hardback and digital versions. It is already on offer from Amazon.com in the US.

 

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Roundup: MLK Day (US) Edition

Posted on January 19, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Financial Times has an article by Janan Ganesh entitled “The right will want a United States of Europe”. It opens with this:

Auberon Waugh, son of the novelist Evelyn, died a quarter of a century ago this month. Never likely to match the old man sentence for sentence, he nonetheless plugged away at journalism. He had a respectable go at fiction too. And unlike his father, a straight-down-the-line conservative, he had at least one interesting opinion.  He was a rightwing pro-European.

Almost everywhere, attitudes to Brussels tend to harden the further right you go on the political spectrum. Waugh Jr bucked that rule, seeing Europe as a potential fortress against American cultural influence and other modern barbarities. He liked the European project because he was reactionary, not despite it. The closest modern equivalent is Jeremy Clarkson, that unlikeliest of Remainers…

Here is a link to the full story.

–The Imaginative Conservative also has story featuring Auberon. This is also on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his death. It is written by David Deaval and opens with this:

Great men shouldn’t have sons. This moral axiom is dubious, at best. It’s understandable why some say it. It’s even more understandable why sons of great men occasionally say it. Great men too often make terrible fathers. Even if apples don’t fall far from trees, they are too often bruised by the branches. Auberon Waugh, eldest son of the great novelist Evelyn, who died twenty-five years ago on January 16, 2001, took from his father both a great deal of suffering and a great deal of good.

Evelyn Waugh was both a serious Catholic convert and a famously cantankerous and slow-to-be-sanctified man. To the question of how a Christian could be such a nasty person, he responded that he would be scarcely human were it not for the faith. It is not to say he had no lovable, loving, or even holy qualities. It is to say that this great artist of the page often made messes of the pages of his life. As a father, Evelyn was distinctly troublesome. The son’s 1998 memoir, Will This Do?, began by observing that “the children of Evelyn Waugh did not come particularly well out of his published letters and diaries.”…

The entire article is available here.

—The Spectator has an article reminiscing about the days when transatlantic journeys were taken in relatively slow comfort and enjoyment on ocean liners rather than aeroplanes. Here’s an excerpt:

…And now? The ships have sailed into the sun­set, but traces of their world live on in art and archi­tec­ture. Where would inter­war fic­tion be without the ship­board love affair? Think of Evelyn Waugh’s Julia Flyte and Charles Ryder on their stormy ocean cross­ing, con­sum­mat­ing the pas­sion that had been impossible back at land­locked Brideshead. Or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers in Shall We Dance? (1937), tap­when dan­cing across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary to the melod­ies of Ger­sh­win (another reg­u­lar pas­sen­ger). But then, out at sea Any­thing Goes: Cole Porter’s fic­tional SS Amer­ican provides the whole set­ting for his 1934 musical…

The article is by Richard Bratby and can be read here.

–An article in The Conversation considers the importance of literary anniversaries and their observance. Here’s an excerpt:

…Literary anniversaries are not just limited to famous and well-loved authors, however significant. Many dates pass us by unmarked, despite the fact that we are in the midst of a golden era of key dates of literary significance.

The 2020s has been a decade of major Romantic-period milestones, including the bicentenaries of the deaths of the poets John Keats (2021), Percy Bysshe Shelley (2022), and Byron (2024). Last year’s Austen anniversary was particularly notable because the writer was so widely and enthusiastically celebrated.

Yet it also was the centenary year of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz-age classic The Great Gatsby, alongside Virginia Woolf’s modernist favourite Mrs Dalloway. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love all turned 80, while children’s classic The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis celebrated its 75th birthday….

The full article by Amy Wilcockson is available at this link.

—The Irish Aesthete (whose byline is “This is not an Oxymoron”) has posted a story about the country house known as Lisnavagh located in County Carlow. Here is an excerpt:

…In September 1937 Lisnavagh was inherited by William McClintock-Bunbury, fourth Baron Rathdonnell who, ten years later and in the aftermath of the Second World War, was faced with the challenge of how to look after a very substantial house on a relatively small income. Initially he and his wife, the artist Pamela Drew, put the place up for sale: one potential purchaser was Evelyn Waugh, then travelling through Ireland in the hope of finding a home for himself and his family: he described Lisnavagh as a ‘practical Early Victorian Collegiate building.’ …

Waugh’s visit took place after the war when he was seriously considering moving to Ireland. The quote is from a May 1947 Letter to John Betjeman in which Lisnavagh appears in Waugh’s short-list of three Irish country houses he was seriously considering after an extensive search (Letters, pp. 249-250). The article is well illustrated and can be viewed here.

–Finally. the Oxford student newspaper Cherwell has posted a brief 2012 story by Charlotte Hart that may be of interest. Here’s the opening:

We could not provide an adequate account of our university’s unusual literary past without mentioning the man who established the Oxford stereotype that remains ingrained in the minds of the public today. Undergraduates applying to Oxford probably envisage an indulgent existence of champagne luncheons, decadent excess and diamond-encrusted tortoises, but they could not be more mistaken (except perhaps for the unconventional choice of college pets).

Evelyn Waugh, it would seem, not only wrote about the decadence of upper class society, but lived it too. His thoughtful, satiric portrayals of the aristocratic way of life in novels such as Brideshead Revisited were partly fuelled by first hand experience. Arguably, it was his time at Oxford that shaped the literary satirist that we have come to know so well…

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Posted in Academia, Anniversaries, Auberon Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Letters, Newspapers, Oxford | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Roundup: Writers on Waugh

Posted on January 14, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

–Two writers have posted a discussion of Waugh’s novel The Loved One. This is on YouTube and involves PhDs Kevin McAleer and Bruce Newsome, each of whom has written a book satirizing California. Here is a description of their talk:

It’s a short novel but rich, a masterfully concise, biting observational novel in which Waugh takes no friends, and uses opposing stereotypes to expose each other, and to expose both at the same time. Kevin and Bruce committed to discuss Waugh’s novel, having themselves each written a novel satirizing California. Bruce admits explicitly that his writing of “The Dark Side of Sunshine” was inspired in at least style by Waugh’s early novels, such as “Bright Young Things,” “Black Mischief,” and “Scoop.” As a reviewer, Bruce found that Kevin’s novel “The LA Kid” reminds of Waugh’s “The Loved One.” But Kevin hadn’t read it! So Kevin and Bruce committed to discuss “The Loved One” after a fresh reading. They didn’t expect to find this much to discuss in a short novel…

Here’s a link.

–Waugh’s biographer Selina Hastings has written an article in the latest issue of The Tatler about Cecil Beaton. This is entitled “Funny! Frenzied! Frivolous! Why the capers of Cecil Beaton and the Bright Young Things continue to captivate a century on”. Here’s the opening paragraph;

‘Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties’ – this was how Evelyn Waugh depicted the era of the 1920s, when the elite of the younger generation, determined to throw off the gloom of the Great War, dedicated themselves to entertainment. As Waugh portrayed them in his novel Vile Bodies, the Bright Young People (or Bright Young Things, as others called them) were funny, frenzied and frivolous, capering from party to party. Among them, and, like Waugh, an astute recorder of the period, was the photographer Cecil Beaton. Beaton had been at prep school with Waugh, who bullied him cruelly. Beaton later described Waugh as ‘a very sinister character’, while Waugh pilloried Beaton in Decline and Fall as the society photographer David Lennox, who ‘emerged with little shrieks from an Edwardian electric brougham and made straight for the nearest looking-glass’…

—The Critic magazine has an article entitled “Into the Boomersverse: Older commentators cannot understand how younger people experience the UK.” This is written by Associate Editor, Sebastian Milbanke, and opens with this:

I am regularly struck by the abiding truth of an observation made about English society by Evelyn Waugh over 70 years ago in Brideshead Revisited:

“They and I had fallen apart, as one could in England and only there, into separate worlds, little spinning planets of personal relationship; there is probably a perfect metaphor for the process to be found in physics, from the way in which, I dimly apprehend, particles of energy group and regroup themselves in separate magnetic systems, a metaphor ready to hand for the man who can speak of these things with assurance; not for me, who can only say that England abounded in these small companies of intimate friends, so that, as in this case of Julia and myself, we could live in the same street in London, see at times, a few miles distant, the same rural horizon, could have a liking one for the other, a mild curiosity about the other’s fortunes, a regret, even, that we should be separated, and the knowledge that either of us had only to pick up the telephone and speak by the other’s pillow, enjoy the intimacies of the levee, coming in, as it were, with the morning orange juice and the sun, yet be restrained from doing so by the centripetal force of our own worlds, and the cold, interstellar space between them…”

–Two internet booksellers have posted extensive lists of books by and about Waugh. Here are links, each of which contains a reproduction of the cover where available. These are posted by MostRecommendedBooks.com (total 47) and GoodReads.com (total 74 ).

–Finally, what appears to be a religious website called DeLibris.org provides a brief description of Waugh’s novel Helena. Here are the opening paragraphs:

A historical novel that narrates the life of Saint Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine, and her quest for truth and the Christian faith in a pagan world. Waugh recreates the Roman era in detail and explores the moral dilemmas of his characters. The novel shows how Helena, despite her position and power, faces personal and spiritual challenges that help her grow as a person and as a believer. The work combines historical facts with the author’s imagination, offering a rewarding reading experience.

Since little is known about Saint Helena’s life, the author —as he himself notes in the introduction— drew on his literary creativity to fill in the historical gaps and imagine unknown episodes. The result is an outstanding novel that combines historical accuracy with imagination, focusing mainly on the pivotal event of the discovery of the True Cross by the empress in Jerusalem…

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Posted in Bibliophilia, Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, Helena, Newspapers, The Loved One, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment