WSJ at Castle Howard

Posted on March 13, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

The Wall Street Journal carries a story about how the Howard family have over the years renovated Castle Howard. The article is by J S Marcus and the photographs by Joanna Yee. Here’s an excerpt:

…The Lake Sitting Room is one of the Howards’ living spaces that has recently received a freshening up from Remy Renzullo, a 33-year-old American interior decorator, who added 19th-century French table lamps. Changes to other rooms include new French wallpaper ($3,885), and new hand-woven floor coverings ($12,952). A new Italian marble fireplace for the sitting room, based on Vanbrugh drawings, cost around $32,362. The Archbishop’s Bedroom has a canopy bed and rare 19th-century Japanese wallpaper.

Renzullo, who divides his time between the U.S. and Europe, also made changes to the Archbishop’s Bedroom, the family’s primary guest room, which is off limits to the public. Large naval pictures were removed in order to highlight the room’s rare 19th-century Japanese wallpaper. Renzullo also redid the 18th-century canopy bed with new French silk damask coverings. Viewers of “Brideshead Revisited” might remember the room as the place where Lord Marchmain, played by Laurence Olivier, dies.

“Brideshead Revisited,” based on the 1945 novel by English writer Evelyn Waugh, is now indelibly linked with Castle Howard. Waugh visited the castle in the late 1930s, and the Howards believe the property at least partially inspired him to create the fictional, dome-topped Brideshead Castle. Jeffrey Manley, an American author affiliated with the Evelyn Waugh Society, said most of the details about Brideshead Castle were based on other sources, but that the conspicuous dome likely draws on Castle Howard. Castle Howard’s Anglican chapel, created in the 1870s, was used in the television series ‘Brideshead Revisited.’

Key locations in the series remain integrated into Howard family life. Nicholas and Victoria [Howard] were married in the castle’s chapel, a monument to the Victorian-era Arts and Crafts movement that appeared in “Brideshead Revisited.” The Howards generally attend public services there at Easter and a few other times a year.

Though the East Wing is their base, other areas of the castle are also reserved for the family, including the New Library, which Nicholas uses as his office. The 1940 fire destroyed the space where the New Library is now located. Nicholas’ father, George Howard, used the proceeds from the filming of “Brideshead Revisited” to create and furnish the new room…

The reference to the chapel at Castle Howard illustrates how Waugh’s use of other structures to describe certain elements in the story created issues for the film-makers. As was explained to me by the late Derek Granger (who produced the Granada TV series), there were Brideshead scenes in the chapel that were filmed at Castle Howard. But in the novel, those scenes took place in a chapel as described by Waugh that was located in Madresfield Court. The Castle Howard chapel was heavily Victorian (see illustration in WSJ article) while that at Madresfield was art nouveau. Here’s how Waugh described the chapel in the novel:

The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and redecorated in the arts-and-crafts stye of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler- roses, flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in armour, covered the walls in an intricate pattern of clear, bright colours. There was a triptych of pale oak, carved so as to give it the peculiar property of seeming to have been moulded in plasticine. The sanctuary lamp and all the metal furniture were of bronze, hand-beaten to the patina of a pock-marked skin; the altar steps had a carpet of grass-green, strewn with white and gold daisies. (May 1945 ed., pp. 35-36)

Granger explained that several features of the Castle Howard chapel had to be hidden or disguised to assure that it was consistent with Waugh’s fictional description. Evelyn Waugh Studies 50.3, Winter 2019, pp. 8-10.

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh Society, Newspapers | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Dame Edna’s Book Sale

Posted on March 11, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Mail has reported the upcoming auction sale of the book collection of the late comedian Barry Humphries (aka Dame Edna Everage). The most interesting item (Lot 235) among the three lots offered relating to Evelyn Waugh is this collection of four large paper reprint volumes of his early work:

Decline and Fall [&] Viles Bodies [&] A Handful of Dust [&] Black Mischief, together 4 vol., each number 3 of 12 large-paper copies signed and numbered by the author, contemporary blue morocco, spines a little darkened, t.e.g., others uncut, Chapman and Hall, 1937; and a copy of the Glen Horowitz catalogue for the Library of Michael M. Thomas, housed in calf-backed drop-back box to almost match the set, large 8vo (5)

⁂ A superb set of this rare limited edition, likely the only such set to exist.

Waugh requested this series to be printed in conjunction with the third, reset, trade editions. Most copies were presented individually to close friends and family, however this set was presented, in its entirety, to Thomas Balston, director of the publishers Duckworth and Co. who had given the young Evelyn his first break in the literary world, when he gave him a ÂŁ50 advance for his biography of Rossetti. [Emphasis supplied]

Also for sale is a presentation copy of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (Lot 236):

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, first edition, one of c.50 large-paper copies, signed presentation inscription from the author to “Andrew & Debo [Cavendish] with love from Evelyn. July 19. 1957” to front free endpaper, bookplate of Deborah Devonshire to front pastedown, original red cloth, slight fading to spine, spine tips a trifle bumped, large 8vo, 1957.

⁂ One of an unspecified number of large-paper copies that Waugh kept for private distribution. Andrew and Deborah Cavendish, later the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, were friends and drinking companions of Waugh’s. Andrew Cavendish was a member Waugh’s gentlemen’s club, White’s . [Emphasis supplied.]

Deborah Cavendish may be better known to Waugh’s readers under her maiden name of Deborah Mitford, sister of the more famous Nancy.

For more information about these and other bookish items of the Barry Humphries estate here is a link to the catalogue. The sale is scheduled for 26 March in London at 1:00pm. I believe that internet participation is possible.

Share
Posted in A Handful of Dust, Auctions, Black Mischief, Decline and Fall, Newspapers, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Daylight Savings Time (US) Roundup

Posted on March 10, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley
–The New York Review of Books has posted a review by Martin Filler entitled “Build Britannia.” This is about a book entitled Interwar British Architecture, 1919-1939 by Gavin Stamp. Here’s an excerpt:
…A visceral distrust of European Modernism–emblematic of British xenophobia in general–is captured in Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel Decline and Fall (1928), which revolves around the destruction of an unrestored sixteenth-century Hampshire country house called King’s Thursday, deemed “the finest piece of domestic Tudor in England.” At its new owner’s behest, this fictive landmark is torn down and replaced by a soulless International Style house designed by Professor Otto Silenus, a German Modernist architect transparently based on Walter Gropius, the chilly and officious founder of the Bauhaus. Silenus complies with the patron’s vague request for “something clean and square,” but before it is completed he delivers a cartoonish screed that echoes Waugh’s deep-seated antipathy to the new:
“The problem of architecture as I see it,” he told a journalist who had come to report on the progress of his surprising creation of ferroconcrete and aluminium, is the problem of all art–the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because it is built to house machines, not men. I do not think it is possible for domestic architecture to be beautiful, but I am doing my best. All ill comes from man,” he said gloomily; “please tell your readers that. Man is never beautiful; he is never happy except when he becomes the channel  for the distribution of mechanical forces.”

–From The Times comes an article by Janice Turner entitled: “Spontaneity succumbed to Covid, like so much else.” Here is an excerpt:

Late for a train — yes, because I hadn’t “pre-booked” — I had to sprint across the King’s Cross concourse. “Where do I change for Hull?” I gasped, and the train steward’s accent, warm and familiar, instantly calmed me down. “Doncaster, love.”

I’ve passed through my old home town en route to York since my mother died in 2022, but not set foot there. No reason. No one left to visit. And in the 20 minutes at Doncaster station until my connection, it felt very wrong not to be rushing up the steps to find a taxi, bracing myself for a day at the care home. Platform announcements pricked my heart: Scarborough (where my parents were happiest), Wakefield (my godmother’s home), South Elmsall (the run-down pit town where all my family lived).

Hull is not Doncaster: Londoners might not discern a different accent but I still can. On the way back, another half-hour change at Doncaster, I felt what Evelyn Waugh described (writing of cradle Catholicism) as “a twitch upon the thread”. I need to go north.

–In an earlier edition, The Times carried a story by James Marriott about Donald Trump’s foreign policy negotiating skills (or lack thereof). Here’s the conclusion:

…Of course the answer to cynicism is not naivety. How often is the serious study of history an exercise in discovering the terrible smallness of great men? US foreign policy in South America and the Middle East has often made a mockery of high-sounding phrases: has any war in recent history been heralded with more jubilant hootings over its “moral mission” than our tawdry and tragic outing in Iraq? America’s critics are not wrong to remind us that it has often acted disgracefully. But I am reminded of the expostulation directed by an outraged lady to the writer Evelyn Waugh: “How can you behave so badly — and you a Catholic!” To which Waugh replied: “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic.”

Even sceptics of the West’s claims to moral superiority should accept that a more idealistic political culture offered statesmen with their eyes on the history books an important inducement to better behaviour. It is to that fading culture of idealism that we owe our foreign aid programme and billionaires like Bill Gates who spend their money eradicating malaria rather than buying political influence. Anybody listening to Europe’s leaders over the weekend knows that high-flown idealism can risk sounding implausible. But in these dark times, we all need it. Citizens no less than politicians.

–The Diario de Sevilla has an article about a review by Ignacio PeyrĂł of a new biography of Spanish writer Julio Iglesias, entitled The Spaniard Who Fell in Love with the World. It opens with this (translation by Google):

There have been many biographies as a genre, with weight and scope. Academic and thoughtful. Literary but widely read and popular (think of Stefan Zweig’s Antoinette or Magellan). There have been canonical ones, knowing that all roads lead to Rome ( Suetonius’s Parallel Lives or Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars ). There are also hybrid ones, by author, like Emmanuele CarrĂšre’s Limonov (you can now see the eponymous film about the unclassifiable Russian poet and quarrelsome man made by Kirill Serebrennikov). And there is Evelyn Waugh’s about the Catholic and martyr Edmund Campion, one of the favourites, precisely, of Ignacio PeyrĂł (Madrid, 1980)….

Share
Posted in Art, Photography & Sculpture, Decline and Fall, Edmund Campion, Newspapers | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Roundup: Waugh and Merton

Posted on March 1, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

—The Tablet has published a thoughtful article by Canadian author Mary Frances Coady about the relationship between Catholic writers Evelyn Waugh and Thomas Merton. This is entitled “The Odd Couple”. Here are some excerpts:

In the early summer of 1948, Evelyn Waugh received the galley proofs of an autobiography written by an unknown American Trappist monk. The title was The Seven Storey Mountain. The editor who sent the proofs, Robert Giroux, of the New York publishing firm Harcourt Brace, had felt the need for a big-name endorsement in the shaky hope that the book wouldn’t lose money. He had not expected Waugh to answer.

Waugh’s response was swift, and Giroux placed it on the front cover of the book’s first edition: “I regard this as a book which may well prove to be of permanent interest in the history of religious experience.” … Almost immediately Waugh set about editing the text for a British readership. An entry of 28 August 1948 in his journal is the sole reference to this work: “Tom Burns gave me [the] enthralling task of cutting the redundancies and solecisms out of Tom Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain. This took a week and has resulted in what should be a fine thin volume.”…

Waugh’s editing work on The Seven Storey Mountain consisted of efforts to make the narrative flow: it was the story of Merton’s life from lost and angry youth to Trappist monk that had caught his interest, and he excised words and passages that slowed the story down….The Seven Storey Mountain, with Waugh’s editing, was published in Britain in 1949 by Hollis and Carter under a new title: Elected Silence…

The long-distance friendship between the two men did not last. Waugh’s interest in American Catholic monasteries seems to have waned almost as soon as it began. Although as he was about to sail back to England, Waugh told a reporter that the thing he liked best in America was Gethsemani Abbey, his stay there had lasted less than 24 hours. Their correspondence lasted for a few more years, but there is no indication that Waugh had any desire to return to Gethsemani or that he had any further interest in Merton or his books. Elected Silence, his labour of love on Merton’s behalf, published 75 years ago, has long been out of print, and The Seven Storey Mountain, with all its imperfections, is what people want to read.

A complete copy of the article is available online at The Tablet’s website. Mary Frances Coady is a Canadian author and editor. Her most recent book is Caryll Houselander: A Biography (Orbis Books). The article in The Tablet is probably based on Coady’s 2015 book Merton & Waugh: A Monk, A Crusty Old Man & The Seven Storey Mountain (Paraclete Press). That is available here. Waugh’s edition of the book (Elected Silence) is out of print but still available in the second-hand book market where it sells at a premium price starting at $50. See this link.

—The Spectator has an article by Robin Ashenden about the books of Hungarian-born writer George Mikes. These are known for their sardonic humor and are mostly entitled How to be a ….., the best known being How to be an Alien. After discussing several of Mikes’s books, the article concludes with this:

…[Mikes] went on to tell a story from his childhood, when a friend, Tibor, had called him out for making others the butt of his savage jokes. ‘He said that one’s spiritual powers were given one to protect the weak against the unjust tyrant
 making a fool of harmless and defenceless people was a worse crime than stealing.’ As a man, Mikes said, he had felt gratitude to Tibor for a long time for showing him the error of his ways. It was only when he became a professional humourist that he realised the gratitude was perhaps misplaced.

Tibor’s ‘nobility of soul,’ Mikes wrote, ‘is the cause of my pending downfall; it is [the] more or less general acceptance of his mentality that has killed Humour
 In many great practitioners – from Swift through W. S. Gilbert to Evelyn Waugh – a strong streak of cruelty is noticeable and, for weaker souls like myself, disturbing.’ But, he added, ‘to deprive humour of its streak of cruelty is like depriving the elephant of its trunk, like depriving water of its wetness. It is like putting a meek, old cow, kindly disposed to the world and to all toreros, in the bullring
 The ensuing spectacle is pleasanter, less bloody and less hair-raising than those provided by more spirited animals, but it is not a bullfight. And it does not quite satisfy the crowd
’

Those who make the case for woke comedy, who rail against punching down, or who work in publishing houses as sensitivity readers – that dismal non-job devoted, at its worst, to casting its own patina of mediocrity over the individual writer’s voice – should sit up here and pay attention. So should we all. It seems that in 2025, even from beyond the grave, George Mikes – that most astute and generous Boswell to the British – has something important to tell us about who we are.

The full article can be read at this link.

–A brief article about the career of Somerset Maugham appears in Chronicle: A Magazine of American Culture. This is by Taki Theodoracopulas. Here is an excerpt:

…Maugham had married and was grandfather to two grandchildren by his daughter Liza (one of them, Camilla, Countess Chandon, is still a great beauty and a friend of mine). Despite that, the master writer openly lived with two men who were his secretaries. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain until 1967, two years before Maugham’s death, but he didn’t bother to hide. Fellow writers in the closet, like Evelyn Waugh, were obviously jealous because Maugham was highborn and did not have to put on an upper-class accent, hide his sexuality, or live in grubby digs—everything he did was first class.

Maugham is almost unknown today, something that doesn’t surprise me. Artistic merit nowadays is not matched with success, while fame and mediocrity go hand-in-hand. Back in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, the Bloomsbury Group literary elite predictably denigrated Maugham’s work, while themselves putting out unreadable experimental crap. But novels like Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale, The Moon and Sixpence, Mr. Know-All, The Razor’s Edge, and short stories like “Rain” are superb, psychologically deep, and imaginative, as well as technically superior and precise.

I can’t say where Taki got the impression that Waugh was jealous of Maugham’s open homosexuality. His only collected review of a Maugham novel (Christmas Holiday, 1939) treats it as a work of genius. I recall that Maugham and his wife were separated and that he afterwards lived openly with his male lovers, but outside of England (mostly in the South of France) because of English laws. Waugh’s best known comment on Maugham’s homosexuality comes from a 1952 letter to Harold Acton. This was about Waugh’s brief visit to Maugham at Cap Ferat: “I…made a great gaffe. The first evening he asked me what some one was like and I said ‘A pansy with a stammer.’ All the Picassos on the wall blanched” (Letters 371-72). Maugham was well known to have had a serious speech defect.

 

 

Share
Posted in Miscellaneous | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Washington’s Birthday Roundup

Posted on February 22, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–D J Taylor has written a thoughtful obituary of David Lodge in the latest issue of the journal New Criterion. This is based on his review of Lodge’s life as written in the three-volume autobiography published in Lodge’s final years. Taylor focusses primarily on the first volume, Quite a Good Time to be Born. The obituary/review concludes with this:

…Lodge the Catholic novelist is a very different proposition to such august ornaments of the trade as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, less interested in salvation and redemption, the Damascene conversion, and the deathbed repentance as in the sheer practical difficulty of squaring “faith” with the demands and temptations of the zeitgeist. Lodge’s characters, consequently, are not doomed (or exalted) ex-ceptionalists but ordinary people trying to get by, nervously monitoring their progress through a landscape that simultaneously excites them and worries them by virtue of the threat it poses to the things they hold dear.

As for Lodge’s own part in this, Quite a Good Time to Be Born, again, harbors one or two earnest identifications and records doggedly set straight. There is a way in which these calibrations of art and the reality on which the art is based would be better left alone. The characters exist quite happily (or not) on their own terms. Best leave them to it. But all this, you realize, is a matter of vital importance to Lodge, the kind of person he was or imagined himself to be, and the professional-cum-creative journey he found himself on. In the week after his death, a caricature of him appeared on the cover of the British Catholic weekly The Tablet, for which he had written for many years, above the caption “How Far Did He Go?” The answer, you suspect, is one hell of a way.

–In an article appearing in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Martin Filler discusses the recent wild fires in Los Angeles. He opens  with a review of the 1971 book about Los Angeles architecture by British author Rayner Banham. Here’s an excerpt from near the beginning:

…A working-class Brit who lived through the Blitz, Banham cherished an optimistic belief that modernism held the answers to perfecting the built environment, if not human nature itself. He also had a romantic streak, and like many of his countrymen (though not Evelyn Waugh, the Jonathan Swift of Forest Lawn) he saw Southern California as a sparkling sybaritic wonderland antithetical to drab, inhibited Britain. The cover image for the first edition of his book was his younger compatriot David Hockney’s painting A Bigger Splash (1967), which depicts a turquoise swimming pool in front of a flat-roofed midcentury modern house and two tall, skinny palms against a cloudless azure sky, rendered in the flat sun-blasted tonalities of LA’s endless summer.

–An article about Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia in the 1930s (the subject of two books by Evelyn Waugh–Scoop and Waugh in Abyssinia) has been posted by the website borkena.com (presumably located in Ethiopia). The article is written by Mengistu Asfaw and entitled “Graziani’s Tyrannical Rule 1936-37”.  Here is an excerpt:

The Italians who had a mere nominal control in the face of the courageous and determined Ethiopian Patriot boldly claimed in Europe that the “war in Abyssinia” is completely over. Whereas, in reality such claims were a fiasco. Opposing such claims of the Italians, the famous English writer Evelyn Waugh in his eye-witness account explained the situation as follows: “the Italians are starving, the soldiers live on a piece of bread a day. Nothing can be bought in the shops. No one will accept the Italian money (lira). The Abyssinians are encamped all around the town. The Italians hold Addis Ababa, the railway line and the road to Makale- beyond that nothing. No one can go a hundred yards outside the town (Addis Ababa). Ethiopians are fighting every day in the center of the town.”

Waugh’s account apparently is quoted from his war reportage book Waugh in Abyssinia.

—The Evening Standard has a preview of the new BBC dramatic series entitled “Dope Girls” which starts tonight on BBC One. Here is the opening:

According to the BBC, the series is inspired by “a forgotten time in history” – a period directly after the end of World War One, when men returned to Britain from the battlefields to find that the women they left behind had found a new sense of empowerment and power. Suddenly, women wanted the vote (shocking), and they wanted to work in institutions like the police rather than the kitchen. Faced with a sudden loss of manpower after the horrendous losses of the First World War, the men started, reluctantly, to cede ground.

This applied to nightlife, too. From 1914 to 1918, around 150 illegal nightclubs opened in Soho, and for the women at the time, London was their playground – whether they worked as chorus girls or were members of gangs shaping the city’s hedonistic nightlife scene. [According to the BBC], “Dope Girls depicts in visceral delicious detail the birth of the modern nightlife industry guided and gilded by hard-fought female endeavour” …

As noted in previous posts, this series has a link to a character in an Evelyn Waugh novel. This was Ma Mayfield in Brideshead  Revisited who was based on Kate Meyrick owner of several night clubs in the interwar period:

…Prostitution was … rife inside her clubs: the girls who worked there were called Meyrick’s Merry Maids, and in fact actor David Niven wrote in his 1971 autobiography that he lost his virginity at age 14 to one of them, called Nessie.

She achieved such a level of notoriety that she even caught the eye of Evelyn Waugh, who apparently used her as the inspiration for his character Ma Mayfield – a nightclub owner – in his 1945 book, Brideshead Revisited.

A fixture of the press, her children eventually married into aristocracy and ran her nightclubs when she worked in Paris or served her five prison sentences. Meyrick died age 57 in 1933 from influenza (London’s clubs and theatres dimmed their lights on the day of her funeral as a sign of respect), but her legacy helped shape clubbing culture in the UK for decades to come.

While not mentioned, it sounds as if there will be elements in the series that may resemble scenes and characters from Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies written at the time the drama is set. The first episode airs tonight in the UK on BBC One and BBC iPlayer at 915 pm and will no doubt appear in due course in other countries.

 

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism, Newspapers, Television Programs, Vile Bodies, Waugh in Abyssinia | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Valentine’s Day Roundup

Posted on February 14, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the New York Times Book Review has posted this notice in its “Read Like the Wind” column. It is written by Book Review editor Joumana Khatib:

The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy, by Evelyn Waugh

You probably know Waugh for his novel “Brideshead Revisited,” or if you’re journalism-adjacent you’ve probably read “Scoop,” or if you really have excellent taste you might cherish “Vile Bodies” as much as I do.

“The Loved One” isn’t as well known, but this novella is quintessentially Waugh: outrageously funny, a satire that arrives like a javelin hurled from left field. It is also very, very weird.

The story follows a community of fairly ineffectual British expats in Los Angeles, and centers on a love triangle involving a funeral home aesthetician, her mortician boss and a rival embalmer–of animals.

I’m as skittish as the next maladjusted mortal about death, corpses, embalming fluids, coffins. And yet! I was howling on every other page. The premise is utterly absurd, sure, and Waugh packs a lot in: a lovelorn man caller Mr. Joyboy, a pair of newspaper reporters writing a pseudonymous advice column, a mad-cap cover-up. (The 1965 film version–which, however improbably, features Liberace–deserves a mention in the DSM.)

But it’s the dialogue that sends the story into the extreme. Take this, as a sample:

“An open casket is all right for dogs and cats,” the animal embalmer (who is also a hack poet) explains to his love interest; but parrots “look absurd with the head on a pillow…Who asked you to the funeral anyway? Were you acquainted with the late parrot?”

God, I’m laughing just retyping that.

READ IF YOU LIKE: Spy magazine, estate sales, “Fawlty Towers.” [or, she might have added, “Monty Python” in which a “late parrot” also prominently figured.]

AVAILABLE FROM: A good library or used-book store, or online at Project Gutenberg Canada (where the book is in the public domain).

–Craig Brown writing in the Daily Mail notes that P G Wodehouse died on Valentine’s Day 50 years ago. He goes on to offer the following:

…One of his greatest champions, Evelyn Waugh, argued in 1961 that ‘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. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.’

Waugh also said Wodehouse was a master of his craft because he could produce ‘on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to the page’. And it is these wonderful similes, so exact yet so ludicrous, that ensure his comedy will never stale.

Brown concludes with a list of 15 of his own favorite P G Wodehouse similes. Here are two of the best from Brown’s list:

  1. Unlike the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.
  2. The shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French. 

The entire article and remainder of the similes can be read at this link.

–Mark McGinness also notes the Wodehousian connection to Valentine’s Day. He writes in The Spectator:

Pelham Grenville (PG – or Plum) Wodehouse breathed his last on Valentine’s Day fifty years ago. As Evelyn Waugh saw it, Wodehouse inhabited a world as timeless as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Alice in Wonderland. Wodehouse himself said it was as though he was forever in his last year at school. It was, Waugh said, ‘as if the Fall of Man had never happened’….

He reserved his wit and conversation for the page. When an uncharacteristically starry-eyed Waugh met Wodehouse for the first time, he was disappointed to find their exchanges did not get beyond the inequities of income tax. And when Plum was invited to join the Round Table gang at the Algonquin hotel in New York, he complained, ‘All those three-hour lunches. When did these slackers ever get any work done?’…

The full article is posted in this week’s Spectator.

–The Daily Telegraph has an article by Jake Kerridge about US novelist Robert Plunket whose 1983 satirical novel My Search for Warren Harding is being reprinted in the UK as a Penguin Modern Classic. Here’s an excerpt:

…Having moved to Sarasota, Florida, and found that trailer park life suited him, Plunket spent many years working for Sarasota Magazine as a gossip columnist – “Mr Chatterbox”, a sobriquet he borrowed from the gossip writer in Vile Bodies by his hero Evelyn Waugh – and became a leading figure in local society. “I was cultivated by the local politicians because they all wanted to see their names in print. And of course every third-rate celebrity with something to sell ended up in Sarasota so I interviewed them all – Pia Zadora, Eva Gabor.”

He covered George W Bush’s trip to Sarasota in September 2001, and witnessed the then-president being told about the Twin Towers attacks while reading to the children at an elementary school. “I can remember his face the moment he figured out what it meant. And then there was just chaos.” And naturally he was on the spot when Paul Reubens, aka the wholesome kids’ comedian Pee-wee Herman, was arrested for indecent exposure at a Sarasota adult cinema: “It was owned by a friend of mine, in fact I helped him programme all the movies.”…

–The Daily Telegraph has also published this letter from a reader relating to a story about Ofsted’s school rating system:

SIR–As a retired teacher of 35 years’ experience, may I recommend to Ofsted the classification of schools described in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall?

“‘We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate school, Good School, and School. Frankly,” said Mr Levy, ‘School is pretty bad.'”

What more need be said?

Max Sawyer

Stamford, Lincolnshire

–Finally, the Hudson Review has posted a long essay by Brooke Allen in which she discusses several notable contributions to literary scholarship that have appeared in the 75+ years of its existence. This one is of particular interest to our readers:

…William H. Pritchard is one of the best literary critics of his time, and it is The Hudson Review’s good fortune that more than 170 of his articles have graced the pages of the magazine over the course of nearly five decades. In “Total Waugh” (1993), his review of Martin Stannard’s two-volume biography of the novelist Evelyn Waugh, Pritchard was among the first to be bold enough to suggest that Waugh, a humorous writer not taken too seriously by the literary establishment of his own day (he was ignored by high cultural institutions of the time like Leavis’ Scrutiny and Eliot’s Criterion), might just turn out to have been the best English novelist of the twentieth century. Thirty years later this opinion has become quite widespread. In his treatment of Waugh, and of Stannard, an exemplary biographer, Pritchard brings into play his characteristically elegant prose and his clear humanistic values. “The premiere English novelist of [the twentieth] century?” he asks. “I can’t think of any, including D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, who is more repaying.” I can’t either.

The entire essay entitled “Classic Articles Revisited” can be read here.

 

Share
Posted in Decline and Fall, Newspapers, Scoop, The Loved One, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Evelyn Waugh Studies 55.2 (Autumn 2024)

Posted on February 13, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

The Society is pleased to post the latest edition of its journal Evelyn Waugh Studies. This is No. 55.2 (Autumn 2024). The contents are described by the Society’s Secretary Jamie Collinson as follows:

With Evelyn Waugh Studies No. 55.2,  Jonathan Pitcher and Yuexi Liu have served us up a smorgasbord of Waviana, with an enjoyably grammarian theme. As someone who recently had to consult his younger sister on the usage of ‘that’ or ‘which,’ I thoroughly enjoyed Hartley Moorhouse’s Evelyn Waugh: Which-Hunter ManquĂ©, and was relieved that even Waugh didn’t always get this right. The essay features cameos from Graham Green, George Orwell and our old friend Randolph Churchill – including his unforgettable exclamation on encountering the bible. While we’re on the subject of Greene, I was struck by a grammatical error in the first line of his autobiography, A Sort of Life: ‘…it may contain less errors of fact…’

Jeffrey Manley has been busy on the reviewing front. He considers a book published around last year’s exhibition of Rex Whistler paintings in Salisbury: Rex Whistler: The Artists and His Patrons, by Nikki Frater. This exhibition was timely, not least as Whistler became a victim of the absurdities of cancel culture when his mural at the Tate Gallery was hidden from public view. Manley examines how Whistler’s world intersected with Waugh’s, and more importantly the latter’s ambivalent and creatively fruitful attitude towards victory in World War II.

Manley has also reviewed Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath, by Jeffrey Meyers, ‘probably the most prolific and admired literary biographer of his generation.’ Here, Waugh has his own say on the literary merit of a contemporary, and points out a glaring error of syntax.

I was astonished to read that, towards the end of 2024, our very own Vincenzo Barney, author of “Behind the Rhododendrons” (on Vile Bodies; 53.1) and the recent “Portrait of the Artist off His Onion” (on Pinfold; 55.1), pulled off a literary scoop. After he reviewed Cormac McCarthy’s late pair of novels, McCarthy’s companion Augusta Britt contacted him, revealing details about her relationship with McCarthy long sought out by other journalists.

Finally, as an avid reader and great admirer of Jeremy Clarke, writer of the Spectator’s Low Life column until his death in 2023, I was delighted to see him appear in EWS. Clarke was a great fan of Evelyn Waugh, as some of his best columns made clear.

I hope you find as much to enjoy in this edition as I did!

Warmest regards,

Jamie Collinson

Secretary, Evelyn Waugh Society

Share
Posted in Evelyn Waugh Studies | Leave a comment

Roundup: End of a Literary Era

Posted on February 8, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–This week’s issue of the New Statesman has as its Weekend Essay an article by John Mullan. This is entitled “The Death of the British Catholic Novel: Catholicism gave English literature something it needs to rediscover” and opens with this:

When the novelist David Lodge died in January, the obituaries reflected on him as a Roman Catholic novelist – perhaps the last in a line of postwar British Catholic novelists. Hardly anyone noted that his distinguished career as a literary academic was also rooted in his Catholicism. Lodge obtained his first academic post, a lectureship at Birmingham University, on the strength of his thesis: “Catholic fiction since the Oxford movement: its literary form and religious content”, composed as a graduate student at UCL in the late 1950s. This author of such an intensely Catholic novel as How Far Can You Go? (1980) – which took a group of nine Catholic students (and a young priest) in the 1950s and followed them through their subsequent trials of sexual discovery and religious doubt – began his career with a study of the very sub-genre to which he would himself contribute.

Lodge’s thesis survives in a warehouse in Essex that forms part of the UCL Library. You can still call it up. Typed blurrily on very thin paper, it earnestly tests whether religious faith can feed a novelist’s imagination. Lodge quotes (in order to disprove) George Orwell’s assertion in “Inside the Whale” that “the atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel”. The roll-call of notable Catholic novelists before the 20th century (all discussed in Lodge’s thesis) would hardly challenge Orwell’s anti-Catholic dictum: EH Dering, Mrs Wilfrid Ward, Robert Hugh Benson
 John Henry Newman’s Loss and Gain, a bildungsroman about a convert to Catholicism, may have been a Victorian bestseller, but is now unreadable.

Yet later Catholic fiction almost changed Orwell’s mind. On his deathbed, he was composing a piece on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (an article that he did not live to finish). Waugh had been received into the Catholic Church in 1930, the year in which Vile Bodies was published, but this was his first explicitly Catholic novel. Orwell, his friend and admirer, regretted the new influence of religion on his work. “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be (ie as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions.”…

Mullan goes on in some detail to consider the careers of other Roman Catholic novelists of the period, focussing particularly on Graham Greene and Muriel Spark. In the case of Greene, Mullan discusses how the religious themes in his The End of the Affair are related to those in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. He ends with a brief consideration of the works of Hilary Mantel, who was born a Roman Catholic but renounced her religion. The article concludes with this:

The British Catholic novel now looks like a historical phenomenon, a thing of the past. David Lodge chronicled it and was there at its end. Yet what Catholicism gave the British novel – a means of “elucidating a moral pattern” – was something valuable. It is still what novels need to find.

The full article can be read at this link.

—The Spectator has a brief article in its “Mind Your Language” series. This is written by Dot Wordsworth and is entitled “‘Loved Ones’ are everywhere at this time of year.” Here’s the text:

“My heart will melt in your mouth,’ said my husband gallantly, unwrapping some leeks from a copy of the Sun which bore this suggestion: ‘Create a special Valentine’s Day message for a loved one with this decorate-your-own gingerbread heart, ÂŁ2, new in at Morrisons.’

Loved ones, even dogs and cats, are fair game for hearts at this time of year. The astrologer Russell Grant warns Pisces about ‘a loved one’s wellbeing weighing on your thoughts’. At other times, loved ones are dead, the phrase being used without irony in broadcast reports of air disasters, war and inheritance tax. It annoyingly presumes that all relations who die are loved.

The Oxford English Dictionary finds examples of loved one from the 18th century onwards. It notes that in recent times it frequently makes conscious reference to the phrase in Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One (1948), quoting this example: ‘I saw the Happy Resting Place of Countless Loved Ones. And I saw the Waiting Ones who still stood at the brink of that narrow stream that now separated them from those who had gone before.’ Waugh had taken his family to California in 1947. While there he visited Forest Lawn, with horrid fascination

Curiously, Aldous Huxley had a similar experience two decades earlier, but in Chicago, as he recounted in Jesting Pilate in 1926. The telephone directory carried an advertisement for a firm of undertakers, or rather morticians: ‘Their motor-hearses were funereally sumptuous; their manners towards the bereaved were grave, yet cheering, yet purposefully uplifting; and they were fortunate in being able to “lay the Loved Ones to rest in – graveyard, the Cemetery Unusual”.’ It takes politicians with tin ears to take the object of Huxley and Waugh’s ridicule and adopt it as a solemn expression of sympathy.

–The Washington Post has an article in which it announces the retirement of its long-serving book editor Michael Dirda from his production of regular weekly reviews. He will continue writing for the paper on the subject of books but on a less regular basis. The article is followed by a Q & A which includes this exchange:

Q. Do you have a few reviews you remember most vividly or fondly? Not because they were raves necessarily, but because the act of writing them and thinking about them has stuck with you?

That’s a subtle question. I once wrote a piece of several thousand words for Book World in which I surveyed then-current biblical scholarship. I must have read 20 books, but the whole project was deeply gratifying. In another life, I did earn a PhD in comparative literature, and there’s a scholarly side to me that I like to allow out now and then.

I also once wrote a column about spending three weeks reading the six volumes of Arthur Waley’s translation of Murasaki Shikibu’s “The Tale of Genji.” That book was a revelation and led me to explore classical Japanese literature and culture. I had a similar experience with Ferdowsi’s “The Shahnameh,” in Dick Davis’s translation of the Persian epic, and with Gene Wolfe’s intricate and tricksy masterpiece “The Book of the New Sun,” the high point of late-20th-century science fiction.

Over the years, I discovered a couple of dozen contemporary writers whose work spoke to me with particular charm or power. I reviewed as many of their books as I could. These included Russell Hoban, John Crowley, James Salter, Steven Millhauser, Gilbert Sorrentino, Guy Davenport, Anthony Hecht, M.F.K. Fisher, Angela Carter, Terry Pratchett, Jack Vance, John Sladek, Robertson Davies, Daniel Pinkwater and Penelope Fitzgerald. What’s more, I think I must have reviewed nearly every nonacademic book written about Evelyn Waugh and Vladimir Nabokov.

Truth is, I’ve loved a lot of books. In my hot youth, it was my ambition to read all the classics of world literature. I still have quite a few to get to.

Oh, but I should mention the review I most often recall when I give talks. It was a scorched-earth destruction of Judith Krantz’s novel “Dazzle.” My lead was: “I read most of ‘Dazzle’ in one sitting. I had to. I wasn’t sure I could face picking it up again.” The kicker, which I won’t quote, is even better. But W.H. Auden convinced me that writing snarky negative reviews — which, by the way, is dead easy — was bad for one’s character, so I’ve tried to avoid doing so as much as possible.

The full article and interview can be accessed at this link.

–St John’s College in Annapolis and Santa Fe has published a list of its courses on offer this summer at the Santa Fe campus. This one may be of interest:

Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor

Steve Isenberg and Mike Peters
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 7–11, 2025
IN-PERSON

As we mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, it is timely that we read the best novel to emerge from that war, Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor. Waugh, a captain in the Royal Marines, imaginatively transforms his personal experience, coupling it with an acute sense of character and foible, farce and tragedy, heroism and cowardice, faith and despair. He created a full picture of British life at home, in the officer’s mess, in battle, from false starts in the Phony War to harrowing days in Greece and Yugoslavia. Comic wit, serious purpose, and heart join to summon a world long gone, yet living anew in this vivacious drama. Americans can discover here aspects of World War II uniquely beyond our literature.

Text: Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honor. Back Bay Books, ISBN 978-0316216692

Registration and other details are available here: https://www.sjc.edu/santa-fe/programs/summer-classics/seminar-schedule

–Somerville College, Oxford, has posted this notice on the internet:

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Catherine Peters (married name Catherine Storr) on Sunday 12th January, aged 94. Catherine taught English Literature at the college between 1980 and 1991, and wrote notable literary biographies of Thackeray (Thackeray’s Universe: Shifting Worlds of Imagination and Reality, 1987) and Wilkie Collins (The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, 1992), as well as books on Dickens and Byron.

She graduated with the top first class degree in English Literature aged 50, in 1980, from St Hugh’s College. Daughter of literary agent A.D. Peters, who represented major writers such as Evelyn Waugh, she was married to psychiatrist Anthony Storr (Wadham and Green Templeton Colleges).

Catherine’s family will hold a memorial in Somerville later this year to commemorate her life. Details will be put here when they are available, and invitations will be sent to those students reading English when she taught in College.

She will also be remembered as part of this year’s College Commemoration Service, on Saturday 14th June, to which all alumni are invited.

The family have asked that anyone who remembers Catherine might consider donating to Marie Curie in her memory: https://catherinestorr.muchloved.com. She benefited hugely in her last years from night-time care from Marie Curie nurses.

 

 

Share
Posted in Academia, Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism, Newspapers, Oxford, Sword of Honour, The Loved One | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Roundup: From Clubs to Travels

Posted on February 2, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Daily Telegraph reports that one of Waugh’s London clubs has voted to continue to exclude women members:

A PRIVATE gentlemen’s club in Mayfair has voted against admitting women for the first time, The Telegraph has learnt.

The Savile Club, established in 1868 for writers and artists, voted to reject a motion calling for women to be allowed as members in an extraordinary general meeting. Male members at the meeting voted against changing “Rule 1” of The Savile’s governing documents, which states the organisation “shall consist of such number of ordinary members, being males over the age of 18”.

Sir Stephen Fry and Lord Lloyd-Webber are among the club’s more recent members, while early literary affiliates included John Le Carre, Evelyn Waugh, Rudyard Kipling and AA Milne. A proposed motion had called for the word “males” in the club’s founding rule to be substituted with “persons”. It also proposed for “the feminine” meaning to apply to any applications to become an honorary or temporary member.

The general committee said this was equivalent to asking: “Do you think the club should admit women members?” The majority of those at the Thistle Hotel in Marylebone on Tuesday voted to “affirm” the original wording. They backed a separate motion stating this “explicitly restricts membership to males over 18 years of age and reaffirms existing unambiguous language”.

Several members resigned in protest over the decision, The Telegraph understands. The Savile Club was approached for comment.

–The Mexican journal Diariojudio.com has posted an article about writer Chaim Potok that opens with this:

Potok was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Benjamin Max (died 1958) and Mollie (nĂ©e Friedman) Potok (died 1985), who were Jewish immigrants from Poland. He was the eldest of four children; all of them converted to or married rabbis. His Hebrew name was Chaim Tzvi. He received an Orthodox Jewish upbringing. After reading Evelyn Waugh’s novel  Brideshead Revisited  as a teenager, he decided to become a writer (he often said that  Brideshead Revisited  was what inspired his work and literature). He began writing fiction at the age of 16. At 17 he made his first submission to The  Atlantic Monthly magazine . Although it was not published, he received an editor’s note praising his work. He attended high school at Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy, the all-boys school of Yeshiva University. In an interview, Potok said: “I prayed in a small shtiebel [prayer hall], and my mother is a descendant of a great Hasidic dynasty and my father was Hasidic, so I come from that world.”…

–The journal The New Criterion has an editorial entitled “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly” critical of the new Labour Government. This appears in its latest issue and opens with this:

It seems like dĂ©jĂ  vu all over again. Last month in this space we wrote about British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s apparent embrace of various dystopian novels in formulating his policies for Great Britain. Most obvious was the government’s embrace of the totalitarian principles laid down in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, especially regarding curbs on free speech and the filtering of common reality through the politically correct scrim of Newspeak. Then there was the demographic catastrophe described in Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints. This novel from the 1970s tells the story of how a tsunami of illegal migration from the Third World, combined with the moral paralysis begot by adherence to progressive ideology, destroys Western civilization. Finally, there was Evelyn Waugh’s Love Among the Ruins. This “Romance of the Near Future” describes what happens when a society, marinated in nihilistic utilitarianism, embraces euthanasia as a social desideratum…

–Finally, the latest issue of Literary Review contains the review of a collection of the  travel writings of Norman Lewis. This is edited by John Hatt and is entitled A Quiet Evening. The review is by Nicholas Rankin and opens with this:

Norman Lewis (1908–2003) was arguably the finest English travel writer of his generation. Other contenders for the title – Robert Byron, Peter Fleming, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, say – were all Oxford-educated, but Lewis was a product of Enfield’s grammar school and its public library. A devotee of the classics – Herodotus, Suetonius, Chekhov, Turgenev – he was attracted southwards. Federico García Lorca was his favourite poet. He gracefully reconfigured his first book, Spanish Adventure, written at twenty-six, into his last book, The Tomb in Seville, at the age of ninety-four. Just as a matador conceals his sword behind a bright muleta cape, he masked a tragic sensibility with a comic style.

This brilliant new anthology, A Quiet Evening, is the latest selection of Lewis’s work edited by John Hatt, who founded Eland Books in 1982. Hatt’s dream was to republish great travel literature in handsome editions. The first classic he reissued was A Dragon Apparent, Lewis’s account of his journeys in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, originally published in 1951, before war devastated Indo-China. (Hatt was surprised to find its author very much alive.) Eland subsequently republished Lewis’s masterpiece Naples ’44 and his study of the Sicilian Mafia, The Honoured Society…

A full copy of the review is available here.

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Collections, Love Among The Ruins | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Roundup: Theatrical Torture, Biographical Therapy and Lineage of Comic Novel

Posted on January 26, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Italian newspaper La Stampa for 25 January 2025 has an article by the late Gaia Servadio which is based on an interview with Graham Greene that seems to have taken place about 1978 (publication date of The Human Factor which is the primary subject of the interview). The article includes a discussion of an earlier exchange between Greene and Waugh:

One of the world’s best-known and most translated authors, Graham Greene was educated at the Balliol, Oxford, where he was with the “golden” generation. Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, Malcolm Muggeridge. “Evelyn Waugh was one of my dearest friends, he was a rebel, he couldn’t stand anyone, not even the Conservatives. He didn’t think in political terms. To give you an example, one evening – one of the last times we were together – we went to see Ionesco’s latest play, Rhinoceros , with Laurence Olivier here in London. The next day I had published a letter in the Times protesting against torture in Algeria. Evelyn wrote me a little letter: “I see you are sending letters to the Times about torture in Africa: why don’t you also talk about ours, inflicted on us last night by Laurence Olivier?”…

Translation by Google. Since Waugh died in 1966, this letter must have been written well before the interview. There is a letter from Greene to Waugh dated 22 June 1960 suggesting that they had both attended (separately) a performance of Rhinoceros the night before. (Graham Greene, A Life in Letters pp. 248-49).  That may have crossed the letter from Waugh referred to in the interview. There is no letter of Waugh to Greene of that date in Waugh’s collected Letters. The author of the La Stampa article, Gaia Servadio, died in 2021, according to Wikipedia.

—Psychology Today has an article suggesting that reading works of biography and autobiography can have therapeutic benefits. Here’s an example:

The life story of … renowned British writer, Evelyn Waugh, was … troubled. Waugh also continually suffered from initial money problems as well as a thorough dislike of the modern world. The man drank heavily to escape his emotional demons, ambiguous sexuality, and conflicting religious feelings, yet left a legacy of being arguably the best British writer of the first half of the 20th century.

The article by Lawrence R Samuel explains how experiences such as those of Waugh can be helpful in therapy:

… we often tend to think our situations are unique when, in fact, many have gone through similar rough patches in their lives and prevailed. Stories of people who have achieved notable, sometimes great things during their lifetime illustrate the genuine possibility of overcoming both personal and professional obstacles, making them an underappreciated therapeutic approach. Life is a roller coaster filled with ups and downs, autobiographies and biographies make clear, with no one immune to setbacks, disappointments, and downright failures…

Here’s a link to the article.

–The Thomistic Institute is sponsoring a podcast on the subject of “The Influence of Virgil and St. Augustine on Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Brideshead Revisited'”. This will be presented on Tuesday 4 February at a time to be announced. The presenter is:

Patrick Callahan, director of the Newman Institute for Catholic Thought & Culture as well as Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at St. Gregory the Great Seminary. There he directs and teaches in a Great Books Catholic program for students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and other regional colleges. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Dallas and his graduate work at Fordham University in Classics. He lives in Lincoln, NE with his wife and 5 children.

Details at this link.

–The latest New York Times Book Review carries an interview with novelist Robert Harris, several of whose books have been adapted for movies or TV. The film version of his 2016 novel Conclave has been nominated for 8 Academy Awards.  Here is the concluding Q & A;

Q. You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

A. My three literary heroes: Graham Greene, George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh.

–The Oxford student newspaper Cherwell has posted a review of the latest book by Jonathan Coe. This is entitled The Proof of My Innocence and is reviewed by Hassan Akram. Here is the opening paragraph:

There are some writers whose line of literary descent is so clear as to resemble a kind of genealogical chart. The lineage of the English comic novel, for instance, runs smoothly from Fielding to Dickens, Dickens to P.G. Wodehouse, Wodehouse to Evelyn Waugh, Waugh to Kingsley Amis, and from Amis through to Jonathan Coe, whose The Proof of My Innocence is one of the funniest novels published in Britain in recent years. In a burlesque fusion of murder mystery, dark academia, and autofiction, Coe charts the development of a pro-NHS-privatisation think-tank from its roots in Cambridge in the 1980s to its short-lived triumph with the rise of Liz Truss in 2022, scattering the story between the perspectives variously of a failed conservative novelist, a Cambridge undergraduate, a murdered anti-Tory blogger, a police detective, and a sushi attendant…

The full article is available here.

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism, Interviews, Newspapers | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment