Tax Day (U.S.) Roundup

Posted on April 15, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Daily Telegraph has posted an article by Juliette Bretan entitled “To understand the world today, read books from 100 years ago.” The examples she offers are several books by Evelyn Waugh. Here are the introductory paragraphs:

Just prior to being brusquely stripped of all of his clothes in a college prank and subsequently sent down from Oxford, the feckless Paul Pennyfeather – the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall (1928) – attends a meeting of the League of Nations Union, for a talk on “plebiscites in Poland”, which he finds “most interesting”.

The novel is a satire of high society – Pennyfeather ultimately has to forfeit his inheritance for his wrongdoings, and becomes embroiled in ever-more farcical events through the novel. Yet it also shows Waugh’s pointed criticism of the impotence of international institutions at the time he was writing. The League of Nations Union was the largest and most influential British peace movement organisation, formed in 1918 in Britain, and was based on the tenets of the League of Nations – an international body established following the First World War to maintain world peace.

Waugh, however, preferred tradition – and lambasted the international order of the modern age. Whilst the League of Nations was touted as an answer to global conflict, Waugh saw the reality: that its promise of collective security would not work without active measures, and that aggression had not been prevented at all. He stated, in his autobiography, that he did “not find much in common” with those who joined the union. Instead, he painted an image of modern society which was profligate, ineffectual, and flawed – and international institutions were at the heart of these issues…

She goes on to discuss Waugh’s views on foreign affairs as reflected in Scoop, Waugh in Abyssinia, and Sword of Honour. The full article can be accessed on Yahoo.com under it’s title. Here’s a link.

–Another Daily Express article is posted on 10 April 2026 (the 60th anniversary of Waugh’s death). This is by William Cash, former editor of the Catholic Herald. Here are some excerpts:

…Sixty years after his death, Waugh remains one of the most important English writers of the 20th century. His novels matter today, more than ever. He was a counter-cultural, modernist visionary seeing that the idea of Western civilisation existing as a morally rooted culture secured by the anchor of shared Christian belief had become puerile and an anomaly. Now nearly all of us accept that we live in a post-Christian age and culture.

But Waugh was so ahead of his time. Even by 1929, during his brief and wretched marriage to an It girl, also called Evelyn, he was writing in The Spectator about his Bright Young Things contemporaries being a “crazy and sterile generation”…

Waugh’s best novels are viscerally counter-cultural in that his cast of heroes, social villains, club bores, debutantes, officers, snobbish dons, saints and sinners – from Guy Crouchback to Julia Flyte – come into their own when they step outside the modern material world and look at it through the lens of an outsider.

As editor of the Catholic Herald, I used to enjoy quoting a few lines from Waugh that he wrote when the paper sent him off in 1938 to cover a rather dull-sounding Eucharistic conference in Budapest. “In England we [Catholics] are always a minority, often a very small one. There is a danger that we look on ourselves as the exceptions, instead of in the true perspective of ourselves as normal and the irreligious as freaks.”

The full article is available here.

–Finally, earlier this week, K. E. Colombini posted an article on Waugh’s visits to America in the late 1940’s. This is also on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Waugh’s death. He begins with the first visit in 1947 which was centered on California and resulted in his 1948 satire of America (or at least that part of it) in The Loved One. He goes on to discuss Waugh’s lesser known subsequent visits in 1948-49. Here are some excerpts:

…Waugh’s second trip to America would yield decidedly different fruit, and he rightly avoided California in his return visit. He was traveling for another purpose, researching a long essay for Life magazine on the state of the Catholic Church in America. Waugh’s article, “The American Epoch in the Catholic Church,” would appear in Life in September 1949.

Waugh focused his late 1948 visit on Catholic communities and leaders across the East Coast, the South, and the Midwest. Postwar America experienced a boom for Catholicism, and Waugh did not just capture it but sought to put it in perspective. Given American history, it was ironic that a country so anti-Catholic in certain ways would eventually see the Catholic Church become the largest religious group in the country…

Waugh was not wrong in his assessment. In America, he saw a Catholic Church in remarkable postwar growth. Waugh visited the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and dined with Dorothy Day in New York City. Of special interest, he met with Thomas Merton at his Kentucky abbey. Waugh edited Merton’s best-selling 1948 autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, into a slimmer volume for U.K. readers, and the two corresponded into the 1950s.

Now, a quarter-century into the new millennium, it is easy to be touched with some sadness looking back at Waugh’s essay, for the American Church he celebrated at that time has become greatly reduced in stature, starting with the massive cultural upheaval of the 1960s. The American Trappists whom Waugh esteemed so highly are also in straits. Among the signs of that distress, St. Benedict’s Abbey in Snowmass, Colorado, founded in 1958, is closing and selling its 3,700-acre property to a tech billionaire for $120 million.

We may be thankful that Waugh would not live to see the decimation of the Church in America. As someone who satirized the modern world so effectively and understood its transitory nature, he saw the Church as a bulwark against the insanity he enjoyed mocking. In America, he encountered the best of both worlds for a Catholic writer – much fodder for his satire and some bright rays of hope for the Church he loved.

This is a thoughtful and well written description of Waugh’s second venture to America based on the Life magazine article. But it fails to mention that there were two back-to- back journeys: the first (on his own) in late 1948 for purposes of research for the Life article and the second (with his wife, a month later) in early 1949 to continue his research and to deliver lectures at various Roman Catholic academic institutions in the eastern portion of the U.S.  The article above tends to conflate the two later journeys but is overall quite accurate. For example, the visit to Notre Dame University took place on the 1949 lecture tour while that to Thomas Merton in nearby Kentucky occurred on the 1948 research tour. Here’s a link to the article which appears in The Catholic Thing and is entitled Evelyn Waugh’s America. A final, briefer trip took place in 1950 in connection with the US publication of his novel Helena.

Share
Posted in Anniversaries, Articles, Catholicism, Decline and Fall, Lectures, Newspapers | Tagged , | Leave a comment

60th Anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s Death: 10 April 1966

Posted on April 9, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

Several papers have posted remembrances of the anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s death 60 years ago on 10 April 1966. Here are excerpts from the best two.

–The one by Alexander Larman appeared in the Daily Telegraph and was reposted in several other papers. It begins with this:

Evelyn Waugh died 60 years ago. The grand master of 20th-century comic writing expired on April 10, shortly after returning home from an Easter service.

With grim appropriateness, he expired on the loo. Few of us can die in exactly the way that we would choose to, but although Waugh may not have wished to be remembered in that particular manner, the black humour of his end is one that is of a piece with his writing, which took no prisoners and rejoiced in the absurdities of life, and death.

It is also fitting that Waugh died at Easter, because his work is so closely bound up with religion. He converted to Catholicism in 1930 and described it as the defining moment of his life, calling his faith “the normal state of man from which men have disastrously exiled themselves”.

He crossed swords with his friend and literary and theological sparring partner Graham Greene, who was also a Catholic but one given to rather more doubts about the faith than Waugh was, and his Oxford contemporary John Betjeman, whose sincere but cheerfully anarchic Anglo-Catholicism was, as he admitted himself, something of a fudge. The poet and church-crawler wrote in 1954:“Though I frequently lapse and am rarely exalted, I am conscious of being under divine providence, to use a bit of jargon for which I can think of no clearer substitute, and thankful that I was brought up by Christian parents.”

This comforting but fundamentally unchallenging view of religion was at odds with the far more uncompromising incarnation expressed by Greene and Waugh. In Brideshead Revisited, Catholicism prevents lovers Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte from being together: the key dramatic moment, which generations of (non-Catholic) readers have found unconvincing, comes when Julia’s father, the sinful Lord Marchmain, returns to the faith on his deathbed, accepting the Last Rites and, by doing so, convincing Julia that to marry Charles would be wicked…

–Mark McGinness writing in The Oldie opens with many of the same points about Waugh’s own death but then goes on to discuss how Waugh deals with death in several of his novels:

…Waugh had always done an eclectic anarchic line in death in his fiction.

His first, novel deaths were in Decline and Fall (1928) where Mr. Prendergast, the clergyman-teacher is decapitated with a saw by a crazy prison inmate. And young Lord Tangent, heir to the Earl of Circumference, shot in the foot by a teacher at Llanabba school whose death is reported almost causally.

This is so starkly different from John Andrew Last, the most poignant of all Waugh’s deaths. The only son of Tony and Brenda killed in a fall from a horse during a hunt in A Handful of Dust (1934). And that moment when Brenda on hearing John was dead, feared it was her lover, John Beaver, and when told it was her son, exclaimed “Thank God”; then immediately regretted it and burst into tears.

The two deaths in Vile Bodies (1930) were almost inevitable. Agatha Runcible dying in a nursing home after driving drink in a car race. And Simon, the Earl of Balcairn, the gossip columnist, Mr. Chatterbox, who, facing social disgrace, took his life by putting his head in the oven.

The most Wavian death appears in Black Mischief (1932) – Basil Seal’s girlfriend, Prudence Courteney, daughter of the British Minister in fictitious Azania, who is unknowingly eaten in a stew by Basil. Frau Dressler’s husband in Scoop (1938) appears to have endured a similar fate – “presumed eaten”.

Then there is the elderly empress, the saintly heroine of Waugh’s favourite novel, Helena (1950), who dies peacefully in God’s grace (‘faith amid decay’), having discovered the true Cross, with her son Constantine beside her.

The most macabre was poor Aimee Thanatogenos, the cosmetician at Whispering Glades, who committed suicide by injecting herself with embalming fluid in the workroom in The Loved One (1948). It got worse – Barlow, employed at the pet cemetery, Happier Hunting Ground, had them cremate Aimee’s body and registered Joyboy, the Glades’ senior mortician and master embalmer, for the annual postcard service. So every year Joyboy would receive a card “Your little Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you.”…

He goes on to mention deaths in Brideshead Revisited and Sword of Honour and concludes with this:

Waugh had been inspired, having witnessed the death only a few years earlier of his old friend … Hubert Duggan, who reconciled to his Faith as he died. He wrote to Lady Mary Lygon: “…… human lives are so planned that usually there’s a particular time — sometimes, like Hubert, on his deathbed — when all resistance is down and Grace can come flooding in.”

Waugh’s own death was not as dramatic as Hubert’s or the marquess’s [in Brideshead] but for him it was timely and much longed for.

–Alexander Larman also has an article in The Spectator about the career of novelist David Lodge, late President of the EWS. Here are the opening paragraphs:

When most readers think of the late novelist David Lodge, it is his peerlessly funny and incisive campus novels, such as Changing Places and Small World, that immediately come to mind. While his satires on progressive academia are indeed some of his finest achievements, this is down to Lodge’s Catholicism, which was not merely a religious faith but a central guiding principle of his writing – if you were being pretentious, you might say ‘a calling’ – and his life. He may have called himself ‘an agnostic Catholic’, and from a religious perspective, this may have been true, but it remained a vital part of his literary career.

While many, perhaps lazily, think of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene as Britain’s pre-eminent Catholic novelists, it is Lodge who dealt with the faith in a far more engaged (and, dare one say it, funnier) fashion than the loquacious ironies of Brideshead Revisited or the almighty guilt trip of The End of the Affair. In his first novel, The Picturegoers (1960), Lodge explored the tension that arose between a group of young, educated Catholics, finding their ways in the world, and their reluctant adherence to a doctrine that seemed, even in those bygone days, to be both proscriptive and antediluvian. (The issue of birth control, or the lack of it, is one that looms large in Lodge’s writing.)…

–Finally, several papers note the disappearance of a well-known and much loved (formerly at least) English foodstuff. Here’s the story from the Daily Express with a contribution from Evelyn Waugh:

An iconic British food is set to disappear after its manufacturer confirmed production of it has ceased. Gentleman’s Relish – officially referred to as Patum Peperium – is a spiced version of potted anchovies. It has been a staple of kitchen cupboards for many decades, after being created in 1828 by John Osborn. Recently, creation of the paste has been overseen by parent firm AB World Foods, which suggested it no longer has a wide enough appeal…

Evelyn Waugh, in his novel Vile Bodies, described a luxurious breakfast featuring “hot buttered toast and honey and gentleman’s relish and a chocolate cake, a cherry cake, a seed cake and a fruit cake and some tomato sandwiches and pepper and salt and currant bread and butter”…

 

 

Share
Posted in A Handful of Dust, Anniversaries, Black Mischief, Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, Helena, Newspapers, The Loved One, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Easter Roundup

Posted on April 4, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

–Jack Trotter has posted an essay on Waugh’s work in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. This is entitled “Remembering Evelyn Waugh: Satirist and Defender of Moral Order.” It opens with this:

Evelyn Waugh was the 20th century’s finest satirist and perhaps the greatest in the English-speaking world after Jonathan Swift. Born in 1903 in London, Waugh was the second son of a prominent publisher whose firm, Chapman and Hall, published many of Waugh’s own books. He was educated at Oxford, where he read history for two years and lived a rather dissipated, rebellious life, leaving without a degree. Waugh turned seriously to writing only in the late 1920s. In 1930, he married his first wife, also named Evelyn. Within a year, she abandoned Waugh for another man—a sense of betrayal haunted Waugh for decades and may have contributed to his conversion to Roman Catholicism that same year. In 1937, after his first marriage was annulled, he married Laura Herbert, a Catholic. They produced seven children…

Trotter offers comments on several of Waugh’s works, some of which tend to be overlooked. His comments on Robbery Under Law and Love Among the Ruins are of particular interest. A copy is available at this link.

–Several papers have reported about a rather expensive property development in Mayfair. It also involves a bookshop with a Waugh association.  Here is an excerpt from the story in the Times:

It will be a bibliothèque for billionaires — one of the world’s most lavish libraries is to be curated by a bookseller-to-the-stars at Britain’s priciest luxury development yet.

The book salon owned by Peregrine Cavendish, the 81-year-old Duke of Devonshire, has been appointed by John Caudwell, the self-made billionaire-turned property developer, to assemble the library at his 1 Mayfair development. The property is due to be completed in spring 2027 and will contain three penthouses marketed at £200 million each.

The Duke of Devonshire, often known by the nickname Stoker, is the owner of Heywood Hill, on Curzon Street in Mayfair, which was reputed to be a favourite of the late Queen. Opened in 1936, the shop-cum-salon was described by Evelyn Waugh at the end of the Second World War as “a centre for all that was left of fashionable and intellectual London.”

In recent years the bookshop, which is run by Stoker’s son-in-law Nicky Dunne, has launched an exclusive service to collate bespoke collections for the private libraries of the UK’s wealthiest and most powerful people, who are sometimes prepared to pay seven figures for the service.

To add to 1 Mayfair’s exclusivity, Caudwell — a working class boy who made millions through Phones4u — announced that Heywood Hill would curate his 1,000-book library. The entrepreneur described his ambition in typically hyperbolic terms, citing “libraries such as those of Aristotle, Alexandria, Pavlovsk, Congress and the Bodleian” as inspiration…

–The Financial Times marks the centennial year of the general strike of 1926 with a review of three books on that subject. One of them is entitled Britain’s Revolutionary Summer and is written by Edd Mustill.  A character from a Waugh novel makes an appearance. Here’s an excerpt:

…In Britain’s Revolutionary Summer, Edd Mustill complains that the events of 1926 have “vanished from the national story we tell ourselves”. He notes that the interwar saga of Downton Abbey managed to end abruptly on New Year’s Day 1926, with the film sequels then resuming in 1927. This discretion has spared us a storyline in which Matthew Crawley volunteers for some strikebreaking fun, such as that enjoyed by “Boy” Mulcaster in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited — Upstairs Downstairs reimagined as class struggle…

The Financial Times review of all three books can be accessed at this link.

—Modern Age magazine has reposted its Spring 1976 review of Christopher Sykes’ biography of Evelyn Waugh. That was in turn published in 1975, so the review if not the biography itself is this year celebrating its 50th anniversary. Here is the concluding paragraph from the review:

…Ten years after Waugh’s death critics are still trying to put him in the proper niche in the hierarchy of British writers (equal to Greene? to Foster?) and list his literary creditors (Firbank? Ford Madox Ford?), but mere authors will continue to despair of their ability to approach that prose perfection, though the existence of the challenge must make them better writers. Readers will regret that the Autobiography, which promised so brilliantly, can now never take the shelf as an explanatory masterpiece, and that the crass patterns of modern life—on both sides of the Atlantic—will never again find so detached and elegant and devastating a castigator. But, to use Waugh‘s favorite phrase, we must not repine. We have that rich legacy, which is a great deal, and we should be grateful for one of the best collections of satire and comedy in all modern literature.

The full review is available here.

–Finally, yet another biography of novelist Muriel Spark has been published. This is written by James Bailey and entitled Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark.  It is reviewed in The Times by Waugh’s biographer (and EWS member) Paula Byrnes. She notes how Waugh took an active interest in Sparks’ writing:

…Evelyn Waugh, an early supporter, advised her to write longer novels and she complied, writing her “magnus opium”, The Mandelbaum Gate, in 1965 before returning to her own pared-back and inimical style…

Waugh is cited again in the conclusion of the review:

…She was, as Waugh noted, the unique voice of her generation, as he once was of his. He handed on the baton when he sent a copy of his last novel, Unconditional Surrender, with the dedication “For Muriel Spark in her prime from Evelyn Waugh in his decline”. But the last word should perhaps be given to the greatest critic of our time, Christopher Ricks, who said if God “looks upon His created world with the same eye with which [Spark] looks upon hers then thank God I am an atheist”.

Read the full review at this link.

Share
Posted in Biographies, Brideshead Revisited, Love Among The Ruins, Newspapers, Robbery Under Law | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Palm Sunday Roundup

Posted on March 29, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

–The BBC has added several Waugh-related programs. Most notably, the BBC Four TV channel will air a TV rebroadcast of two programs on 9 April. These include the theatrical film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, first broadcast on BBC in 2011 following theatrical distribution. This will air at 20:00 UK time. It will be followed by a recording of the 1960 BBC Face to Face TV interview of Evelyn Waugh by John Freeman at 22:05.

The film is described as follows in the BBC Four announcement:

Film adaptation of the novel by Evelyn Waugh. In the early spring of 1944 Charles Ryder, a disillusioned army captain, arrives at Brideshead Castle, the new Brigade Headquarters. It is a place he knows well, and he is transported back in time to 1922 and his first meeting with Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of Lord Marchmain. Charles Ryder proceeds to tell in flashback the story of his association with the castle and the doomed aristocratic Flyte family.

The Face to Face interview is also described:

John Freeman faced a difficult subject in Evelyn Waugh when he interviewed him in 1960. Waugh, author of Brideshead Revisited, was in characteristically obstructive frame of mind. The result is a rare glimpse into the life and temperament of one of the greatest novelists of this century.

There will also be a rebroadcast of a 2016 BBC Radio Three discussion on 5 April at 22:00. Here is a description:

A celebration of Evelyn Waugh to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. Matthew Sweet is joined by two writers who are long term admirers – Adam Mars-Jones and Bryony Lavery and by Waugh’s latest biographer, Philip Eade and his grandson and editor, Alexander Waugh.

Brideshead Revisited – adapted by Bryony Lavery – runs at York Theatre Royal from Fri 22 Apr – Sat 30 Apr and then goes on tour to Bath, Southampton, Cambridge, Malvern, Brighton, Oxford, Richmond.

Evelyn Waugh – A Life Revisited by Philip Eade will be published in July.

The 50th anniversary of Waugh’s death in 1966 was in 2016.

Finally, another rebroadcast which is currently available on BBC Radio Four’s “Great Lives” series is also noted:

Comedian Russell Kane nominates the novelist Evelyn Waugh.

One of the greatest prose stylists of 20th century literature, not to mention one of the funniest, novelist Waugh also has a reputation for being a snob, a bully, and a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary.

How much of this was a self-parodying pose, and how much the underlying truth?

Russell is supported by literary critic Ann Pasternak Slater. Both are unabashed Waugh fans.

Russell calls him “a ninja master of banter”, but series presenter Matthew Parris says he can’t stand him…

This will continue to be available until 9 April.

–The Hay Festival has published a list of its events for this year’s edition to be held 21-31 May at Hay-on-Wye. These include “Event 106” which is described as follows:

Bright Young Things
Book to Screen: Film Screening
Sunday 24 May 2026, 4pm – 5.45pm – MUBI Cinema
Stephen Fry’s directorial debut is a dapper look at the swish society circles of pre-war London. Fizzing with wit and insight, this frolicking adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies brims with well-polished pleasures.

In 1930s England, a group of reckless socialites dominate national gossip. Among them, aspiring novelist Adam is trying to raise enough money to marry Nina. While his attempts are constantly thwarted, his friends are slowly on the road to destruction in their search for newer and faster sensations.

Directed by Stephen Fry (2003). Film duration: 1 hour 42 minutes. Certificate 15.

The event is co-sponsored  by the film distributor MUBI, but the film presentation will not apparently be accompanied by any discussion or appearances involving the producers or cast of the film. In any event, the announcement also notes that all tickets for this event have been sold.

—The Observer has published an “Essential Reading List for those Ready to Reinvent Themselves”. This is written by author Adam Steiner and Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited is at the top of the list:

Waugh is the classic English author of black humor and biting social satire. With this book, he dialed back the cruelty and acerbic tone and wrote in his most luxuriant and rich style. This book presents Waugh’s departure to write more deeply about love and to expose the fickle naivety of the British class system, culminating in the never-ending flame of his Catholic faith. It is one of the best books about friendship, and how these early bonds of youth can twist and turn as our lives change shape into adulthood.

For more information on the list and how it was prepared, see this link.

–Finally, the Amsterdam News (a New York paper covering Harlem) has published an article about “The Real Housewives of the Harlem Renaissance”. This is by Michael Henry Adams and includes this contribution by Evelyn Waugh:

…Evelyn Waugh’s diaries give an account of his encounter with the Turner Laytons. He wrote of going to a party given by “Layton the black man” at the studio of an artist called “Stuart Hill. All very refined — hot lobster, champagne cup and music. Florence Mills, Delysia, John Huggins, Layton and Johnstone[,] and others sang songs.” If Waugh was okay with jazz and as a brief encounter, even so unsavory a social occasion, the sexual risk of someone like fashionable singer Leslie “Hutch” Hutchinson, who “carried-on” with women and men, from the highest strata of London, was not…

Mrs. Turner Layton is one of the principal subjects of the article. Given Waugh’s antipathy to music (he found listening to it painful), it should not be assumed without more detailed research that the jazz music on offer in the quoted text was “okay” by him. The events in which he took part were apparently in 1927 and were located in London, not New York (Diaries, 281-83). See also Martin Stannard, vol. 1, p. 133: “Waugh disliked this association with Jazz Age black Americans; he had no ear for music, he felt superior to coloured people. But the fashionable world had taken them up and he was too uncertain of himself to disregard the fashionable world.”

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Brideshead Revisited, Festivals, Film, Interviews, Newspapers, Television, Theater, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Late March Roundup

Posted on March 24, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

–The religious/political website First Things has reposted its 1993 review of Martin Stannard’s two-volume biography of Evelyn Waugh. This is by George Weigel who opens the review with this:

Many great novelists have had intricate, even prickly, personalities. But in Evelyn Waugh, nature and grace worked overtime to produce an extraordinary character, a full understanding of whose complexities would require the combined skills of an archaeologist, a psychiatrist, and a Jesuit confessor of the old school. Martin Stannard, a lecturer in English at the University of Leicester, doesn’t quite fit that bill. Still, and with far more acuity than was evident in Christopher Sykes’ earlier study, the multiple levels of Waugh’s persona are laid bare and, in some instances, gracefully, even insightfully, explored in Stannard’s recently completed two-volume biography. (The latter volume, which avoids the excessive Freudianism of the former, is in most respects the superior effort.)

Who, or what, was Evelyn Waugh? He was, touching but the surface of the man and his art, a brilliant satirist—one of the funniest writers of the century. But the humor was combined with a literary craftsmanship unsurpassed among his contemporaries (although Waugh himself would protest here in favor of Wodehouse). To take but one local comparison: Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanitiesis a splendid dissection of contemporary American manias—race, sex, money, status; but for all its wit and insight, the scalpel of Wolfe’s wit in his massive Bonfire cuts nowhere near the heart of American materialism’s peculiar darkness so cleanly as did Waugh in his little novella, The Loved One. Nor does it involve any diminution of Wolfe’s accomplishments to suggest that the difference between these two wildly funny authors is rather easily stated: Wolfe is a brilliant writer, but Waugh was a genius, and (at least at his work) a disciplined genius to boot. Indeed, Waugh was a master craftsman of English prose, arguably the finest since Henry James…

The full review is available here.

–Another Waugh biographer and member of the Evelyn Waugh Society is interviewed on the website Flashbak.com. This is Duncan McLaren but the interviewer is not identified.  The interview is entitled “Waugh, Waugh, Not Jaw, Jaw: An Introduction to Evelyn Waugh’s Best Books” and a text is posted here.

–An enterprising literary poster printmaker has produced a poster for Brideshead Revisited. The poster may be reviewed at this link and is available for sale. The details are provided on the website.

COMMENTS (6 April 2026): The flashbak.com interview is reposted from 2021 when it was originally conducted and has been included in previous issues of EWS news. It is none the less worth reading again.

Share
Posted in Art, Photography & Sculpture, Biographies, Interviews | Tagged , | Leave a comment

St Patrick’s Day Roundup

Posted on March 17, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Sydney Morning Herald has an article about the “co-authored novel”. This is written by Drew Turney and opens with this:

Evelyn Waugh is credited with saying “I never can understand how two men can write a book together. To me, that’s like three people getting together to have a baby.” Tom Clancy called co-writing “the ultimate unnatural act”. Real literature, we’re told, is born from solitary genius.

But co-writing has a home in almost every other form of artistic writing, and we’re seeing it increasingly in fiction. Is the archetype of literary talent – hunched over a typewriter, chain-smoking and wringing prose out of blood, sweat and tears like Ginsburg, Woolf or Burroughs – still worth defending?…

See copy at this link.

–Taki Theodoracopulos writing in The American Conservative discusses “The End of the War Hero Novel”. After noting the primary American writers of this genre (Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, and James Jones), he moves to what he sees as the only British example, Evelyn Waugh and his  war trilogy Sword of Honour:

… Separating the writer from the writing is important. As a person [Waugh] was a grumpy, drunken, social climber, a practicing homosexual who had seven children by his second wife, a brave soldier and a vicious gossiper, who wrote the most exquisite pared-down prose. Go figure, as they say. The nice man theory of literary merit is nonexistent. In our emotional era of cancelling and shouting down anyone that offends us, Waugh would have been a goner, along with his work. Waugh senior’s books were a delight. Brideshead Revisited, Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust, Decline and Fall, Black Mischief, Scoop and others were full of characters shown with clarity and elegance in all their absurdities. Yet Waugh’s predilection for grotesque rudeness and condescension to anyone below his social status, especially any foreigner, was what betrayed Waugh’s insecurity of having been born not of the upper classes. He was the most awful of men and the most delightful of writers…

A full copy is available here.

—The Spectator has an article entitled “Brutalism is beautiful” in which Sebastian Milbank defends the style. The article opens with this:

Is a concrete Brutalist complex as worthy of commemoration and preservation as a medieval cathedral or neoclassical stately home? The decision to grant London’s Southbank Centre Grade II listed status last month is an issue on which tweedy conservationists and iconoclastic modernists trade places for the day. Tories reach for the dynamite. Lefties plead that tradition must be protected. But who is right? And why is Brutalism so divisive?

Even those who hate Brutalist buildings must concede that it’s a form of architecture that is arresting and hard to ignore. The Southbank site has long been a cultural flashpoint. Its origins go back to the post-war Festival of Britain, whose 75th anniversary falls in May. Though often given a nostalgic tinge now, the Festival was widely loathed by many conservatives like Evelyn Waugh, who sneered at its “monstrous constructions”…

Full article here.

 

Share
Posted in Newspapers, Sword of Honour, World War II | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Early March Roundup

Posted on March 7, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

–An exhibit in London which may be of interest is mentioned in the papers. This is Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture. Here are the details:

300 years after his death, a major new exhibition exploring one of the UK’s greatest architects – Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726) – is now open at Sir John Soane’s Museum.

Hailed as ‘The Rockstar of the English Baroque’ and ‘The original starchitect’, Vanbrugh designed some of the UK’s most admired and loved country houses, including Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, with each one featuring his signature ability to exploit the emotional impact of architecture by making exciting and dramatic use of light and shadow, recessions and projections. Sir John Soane (1753-1837) cited Vanbrugh as one of his great influences, remarking that he had “all the fire and power of Michelangelo and Bernini”.

Curated by Sir Charles Saumarez Smith CBE and architect Roz Barr, the exhibition features never-before-exhibited drawings from the V&A and Sir John Soane’s Museum, including many in Vanbrugh’s own hand, and is an opportunity to see a selection of Vanbrugh’s drawings for major projects like Castle Howard, but also smaller, more experimental plans for schemes such as the housing estate he envisaged at Greenwich.

Perhaps overshadowed by contemporaries Nicholas Hawksmoor and Sir Christopher Wren, the emotional impact and imagination of Vanbrugh has continued to be admired, particularly by architects, in the centuries since. The exhibition highlights Vanbrugh’s enduring architectural ideas and influence, including on two of the most influential architects of the 20th century, Robert Venturi (1925-2018) and Denise Scott Brown (b.1931). A new short film by filmmakers Anita Naughton and Jim Venturi, their son, explores this connection and will be shown on loop in the Museum’s Foyle Space.

The exhibition is part of the #VANBRUGH300celebrations organised by The Georgian Group, which will include events and activities across the year at six of the architect’s most significant creations.

Waugh mentions Vanbrugh several times in his writings.

—The Times has an article about a new book by Adrian Wooldridge entitled Centrists of the World Unite. It opens with this:

Early on in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies, set amid the chaos and fragmentation of the 1920s, the protagonist describes Shepheard’s Hotel in Mayfair as a place where one can “still draw up, cool and uncontaminated, great, healing draughts from the well of Edwardian certainty”.

One might say something similar about Adrian Wooldridge’s new book. It is a place where the centrists among us, demoralised by the rise of populism, can draw up great healing draughts of 1990s “end of history” certainty about liberalism. It’s all going to be OK, lads, Wooldridge assures us. Liberalism is in retreat but it is not defeated. It can and must be renewed, as it has been before…

—The Spectator has an article entitled “British politics has become a Devil’s Wheel” that opens with this:

There is a moment in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall which has been much on my mind lately. It is the bit towards the very end of the novel when our hero, Paul Pennyfeather, re-encounters the sinister modernist architect Professor Otto Silenus. By this point Pennyfeather has undergone all manner of travails. He has been debagged and sent down from Oxford, accused of human-trafficking and sent to prison. But, as the pair sit outside the Corfu villa in which Pennyfeather is staying, the professor suddenly offers to reveal his theory about the meaning of life.

Silenus describes a particular fairground attraction, the Devil’s Wheel (‘the big wheel at Luna Park’). For five francs the public can go into a room with tiers of seats. At the centre is a great revolving floor which spins around fast. People try to clamber up the revolving floor and get to the center of the wheel. How everyone whoops and hollers as they similarly get flung around and fail…

–The website Medium has posted an article by Ilaria Salvatori comparing Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited with what may be a relatively recently translated Italian novel by Goliarda Sapienza. Here’s the opening:

A Comparative Analysis: Brideshead Revisited (1945) and The Art of Joy (1998)

There is a narrative architecture common to both novels that warrants immediate attention. An outsider of modest origins, the middle-class artist Charles Ryder in one, the Sicilian peasant girl Modesta in the other, comes into contact with a declining aristocratic family. They assimilate its codes, wander its halls, and eventually settle within its walls. In both cases, the ancestral home is a living organism, heavy with history and symbolic power: Brideshead Castle in England, and Villa Brandiforti in Sicily.

Up to this point, the resemblance is striking. However, from this shared threshold, the two novels diverge toward opposite horizons. Understanding how and why they diverge is perhaps the most precise way to read them both…

The full article is available here.

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, Exhibits, Newspapers, Vile Bodies | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Daily Telegraph Reviews BBC Waugh Series

Posted on March 1, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Telegraph has posted a review of Russell Kane’s series of programs about Evelyn Waugh and his works. (See earlier posts.) This is by Jane Shilling, but it is not clear whether she has seen the entire series. Here are the opening paragraphs:

It is almost 60 years since the novelist Evelyn Waugh died on Easter Day 1966, and the comedian Russell Kane is marking the anniversary with a Radio 4 series, Waugh, What Is He Good For?

Starting today, Kane explores the themes of Waugh’s major novels, from Decline and Fall to the Sword of Honour trilogy. It is not the first time that the comedian has championed his literary hero. He chose Waugh as his specialist subject for Celebrity Mastermind – and won (joking that for true authenticity he should have come a poor third, echoing Waugh’s Oxford degree).

He argued the novelist’s case in Radio 4’s Great Lives, and in his series Evil Genius he attempted to defend Waugh against the preconceptions (or in one case complete ignorance) of three fellow comedians, two of whom knew his writing only from the 1981 television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited – a work about, as one puts it: “Toffs with problems they don’t want to talk about.”

In his exposition of what Waugh is good for, Kane has consistently taken the pure (and intrepidly retro) academic position of separating the writing from the writer, summarising him in Evil Genius as a “grumpy, drunken, elitist bore who wrote the most beautiful, exquisite, pared-down prose that could go right to the heart of emotional delinquency in people.”

It is a distinction that escaped the presenter of Great Lives, the journalist and former Conservative MP Matthew Parris, who complained that Waugh “doesn’t seem a very nice man”, expressing his preference for novelists whose company he thought he might have enjoyed, such as Jane Austen or George Eliot…

The full review (entitled “Are we too woke for Evelyn Waugh?”) is currently posted by Yahoo (linked here) but you might not want to wait too long to connect if you want to read it.

Share
Posted in Lectures, Newspapers, Radio, Radio Programs | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

BBC Announces Another Waugh Rerun

Posted on February 28, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

In addition to the several Waugh-related programs about to be broadcast by the BBC (as discussed in previous post), they have recently announced another one. This is the rebroadcast of a 90-minute radio adaptation of Vile Bodies. This was originally transmitted in 1970. Here is the information:

Time: 1928. Place: mainly London.

The decadent exploits of the Bright Young Things of the late 1920s, artistic socialites in a world that vanished before the Second World War.

Starring John Standing as Adam, Lynn Redgrave as Agatha Runciple and Anna Cropper as Nina.

Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 satire adapted by Barry Campbell.

Adam … John Standing
Agatha Runciple … Lynn Redgrave
Nina … Anna Cropper
Lottie … Julia Lang
Mrs Ape … Margaret Robertson
Drunken Major … Alan Lawrance
Lord Balcairn … Ian Lubbock
Colonel Blount … Anthony Jacobs
Social editress … Grizelda Hervey
Ginger Littlejohn … Sean Arnold
Mrs Florin … Lynn Carson
Benfleet, a publisher … Leo Maguire
Matron … Diana Robson
Customs Chief/Judge … Malcolm Hayes
Mr. Brown – Prime Minister … Gerald Cross
Mrs. Brown … Pauline Wynn
Miles Malpractice … Richard Griffiths
Margot Metroland … Carol Boyer
Faith … Patricia Gallimore
Chastity … Elizabeth Morgan
all other parts by members of the cast

Producer: R D Smith

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in October 1970.

For more details about the rebroadcast which is rescheduled for 6-7 March, see this link.

 

Share
Posted in Adaptations, Radio, Vile Bodies | Tagged | Leave a comment

Lenten Roundup

Posted on February 23, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

–Lancing College has announced the details of this year’s Evelyn Waugh Lecture. Here is the announcement:

The Head Master, Dr Scott Crawford, requests the pleasure of your company at the Evelyn Waugh Lecture and Annual Foundation Dinner, to be held on Thursday 30 April 2026 at Lancing College.

Guest Speaker: Juliet Nicolson, British author and journalist

Juliet Nicolson is a social historian.
Her books about life in Britain in the 20th Century include The Perfect Summer of 1911, The Great Silence 1918-20 and Frostquake, the icy winter of 1962-3.
Her memoir A House Full of Daughters was followed by The Book of Revelations 1950s-2026, about women and their secrets.
She lives with her husband Charles Anson  in East Sussex.

Programme

6.45pm – Drinks in the Megarry Room
7.30pm – Lecture in the Sanderson Room
8.30pm – Dinner in the Dining Hall
10.30pm – Carriages

Dress code: Lounge Suit or equivalent

[N. B.] Attendance is by invitation only and is extended exclusively to donors to the Foundationers’ Campaign.
If you would like to make a donation or find out more about the campaign, please contact (click to email).

Inasmuch as there is not necessarily any extended discussion of Waugh or his works, it seems unlikely that the school would extend space available invitations to Waugh Society members as it has in the past.

—The Spectator has an article by Flora Watkins about the former Prince Andrew in which she focusses on his upbringing in the royal household. Here’s how she concludes:

…There’s no dignified way out of this for Andrew, no tidy, convenient Lewis Carroll ending where he wakes up to find it was all a dream. What would the Queen have made of this latest installment in this sordid saga? Her Majesty might have gained some comfort from the fact her darling Andrew wasn’t alone yesterday, on his 66th birthday. For as Evelyn Waugh observed, anyone who has been to a British public school will always feel comparatively at home in jail.

The full article is available here. 

–The Roman Catholic journal Tablet opens the lenten issue of its weekly online update with this:

St Macarius, the fourth-century Bishop of Jerusalem, appears as a put-upon provincial clergyman in Helena, Evelyn Waugh’s bouncy novel about the mother of Constantine and the True Cross. He is appalled by the Emperor’s plans for architectural glories to honour the holy places. His Lent is unsubtle:

It was a season not yet standardised in its austerity. At Jerusalem, where they kept holiday on Saturday as well as on Sunday, there were eight five-day weeks of fasting. And when Macarius said ‘fast’ he meant quite simply ‘starve’. Other dioceses indulged in mitigations – wine, oil, milk, little snacks of olives and cheese – which allowed the faithful to maintain a state of continuous rabbit-like nibbling. In Jerusalem if a man wished to attain the rewards of fasting he lived on water and thin gruel and nothing else. Some kept the full five days on this fare; many took Wednesdays off and dined heavily; others, weaker still, dined on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was left to each to judge his own capacity. But if he did fast, he must fast thoroughly; that was Macarius’s rule.

Working on Helena was one of Waugh’s Lenten resolutions in 1948, along with abstaining from wine and tobacco. That’s a more familiar agenda than the neatly-sketched ascetism of the Early Church, as is Waugh’s failure to get the book to the printers until 1950. Lent turns our New Year’s resolutions into religious obligations, with absolutely no discernible effect on the rate of success.

Dietary rules have all sorts of benefits for personal and social health. Elizabeth I’s chief advisor William Cecil was so alarmed by the damage done to the English fishing fleet after the Reformation by the end of the Friday abstinence that he introduced a bill – dubbed “Cecil’s fast” – to make it a misdemeanour to eat meat on a Friday or a Saturday, with a half-fish day on Wednesday for good measure. We’re now accustomed to inversions like Dry January threatening the pub trade.

–The Guardian has posted an article in which it identifies and discusses the “greatest ever TV romances”. Here’s a contribution by Sarah Dempster:

Charles, Sebastian and Julia in Brideshead Revisited

Share
Posted in Brideshead Revisited, Helena, Lancing, Lectures, Newspapers | Tagged , , | Leave a comment