MLK Day Roundup

Posted on January 23, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–The US-based Jesuit journal America has an article in its latest issue describing the differences and similarities of conversions to Roman Catholicism by writers and intellectuals in the US and UK. It opens with the UK example of Evelyn Waugh and describes his disappointments with the reforms implemented in the 1960s just before his death. The article, entitled “England’s ‘Catholic Moment'”, by one of the magazine’s editors, James T Keane, then continues:

…Waugh’s move to the Roman Church in 1930 in what was a solidly Protestant nation was one of many such events in an extraordinary period beginning around 1833, in which British Catholicism’s intellectual profile was dominated by a group of scholars, writers and popular figures who had done the same. In a nation that in 10 years will recognize half a millennium since its dramatic public break from the Catholic Church, a striking majority of British Catholicism’s most prominent figures in the 19th and 20th centuries had “swum the Tiber,” as the saying went. Like Waugh, many did so with some misgivings and later regrets, but there was no shortage of swimmers.

The most famous were surely Cardinal John Henry Newman and Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, who were formerly priests in the Anglican Communion and prominent leaders of the Oxford Movement, a 19th-century campaign to reassert the Catholic heritage of British Christianity. But they were joined by a host of others over the 130 years, including Waugh, Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., the Rev. Robert Hugh Benson, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, the Rev. Ronald Knox, G. K. Chesterton, Edith Sitwell and many more.

This epoch was so extraordinary in the life of the church that the historian Patrick Allitt began his 1997 book Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome with a startling assertion: “Nearly all the major Catholic intellectuals writing in English between 1840 and 1960 were converts to Catholicism.” Such figures, Mr. Allitt argued, enjoyed educational advantages still largely denied to cradle Catholics in both societies, but also benefited from an intellectual adventurousness that was not common among their cradle-Catholic peers.

These converts were marked by their creative output, but also in many cases by a commitment to Catholicism as an intellectual and religious bulwark against modernity. As our own cultural moment in the United States has included some prominent conversions to Catholicism—most notably Vice President-elect JD Vance—and conjecture about the influence of tradition-minded Catholic voices in government and politics in general, what might we learn from that period in British Catholic history?…

This is followed by a comparison of the conversions which took place within the intellectual community in the US during this period. A full text is available at this link.

–Alexander Larman writing in the Washington Free Beacon reviews William Boyd’s latest novel and sees links to Waugh’s works. Here’s an excerpt:

…William Boyd has been one of literature’s great purveyors of what you might call the thumping good yarn ever since his first novel, 1981’s A Good Man in Africa, cannily updated Evelyn Waugh’s distinctly un-woke but hilarious fiction for a contemporary audience. Ever since then, his superbly written, ceaselessly engaging books remain some of the most reliable pleasures to be found on any bookshelf, anywhere. Over the past few years, Boyd has settled into two main modes of storytelling. The first is the so-called whole-life novel, in which he follows an individual over the course of their entire existence; a literary form that he pioneered with 1987’s The New Confessions, perfected with his 2002 masterpiece Any Human Heart, and has since revisited several times, most recently in 2022’s The Romantic. And the other is the spy novel, which Boyd, for my money, does as well or better than any living writer.

Gabriel’s Moon, the first in what Boyd has suggested will be an ongoing series, is most definitely a spy novel of the Buchan-esque school, although there is nothing old-fashioned about the pace and vigor with which this particular story unfolds. Indeed, at times, the rat-a-tat-tat speed is almost disconcerting, rather like being tossed about uncontrollably on a rollercoaster. In the first few pages alone, we are introduced to the protagonist Gabriel Dax as a child, shortly before his house burns down, killing his mother, and from which conflagration he escapes only by blind luck. When we next meet Dax, he is a well-respected writer, on assignment in the Congo to interview its new president Patrice Lumumba. The idealistic politician talks of democracy and a bright future for his country, so inevitably he ends up assassinated under the auspices of untrustworthy foreign powers. And, as Dax is one of the last people to have seen Lumumba alive, his interview tapes are of enormous interest to these untrustworthy foreign powers…

Here’s a link to the full article.

–A blogger on the weblog “Sunshine and Celandines” reports on his recent visit to the seaside at Lytham Hall in Lancashire:

…The lives of the residing Clifton family fared well until the 1800s when John Talbot Clifton inherited the estate. Under him and then his son Henry Talbot De Vere Clifton, their overly extravagant spending squandered away the family fortune.

A little online research also reveals that the writer Evelyn Waugh was invited to stay at Lytham Hall by Henry in 1935. It is claimed that Waugh may have then based the character ‘ Sebastian Flyte’ in his novel ‘Brideshead Revisited‘ on Henry. In a letter to a friend he describes the Clifton family as ‘ tearing mad, all seated on separate tables at meals’. Waugh also met Henry’s mother Violet and his siblings,  including the wonderfully named ‘ Easter Daffodil Clifton’ who eloped with a gamekeeper



Henry Clifton was the last Clifton to inhabit Lytham Hall and today the house and estate are jointly looked after by various charities…

As has been noted previously, there are far more compelling candidates for the model of the character in Waugh’s novel, although the resident of Lytham Hall may well have made a contribution.

–The New York Adventure Club has announced an upcoming event that may be of interest. This is a webinar called ‘London’s Underground Nightlife of the 1920s & 30s’. It is scheduled for Thursday, 11 Feb 2025 at 5:30-7:00 pm EST; tickets $12.00. Here’s a description from their website:

Join New York Adventure Club as we explore London during the early 20th century, from the rise of illicit cocktail lounges and clubs that sprung up in the West End to the cat-and-mouse game between eccentric club owners and the police at Scotland Yard.

Led by Lucy Jane Santos — historian, writer, and cocktail aficionado — this virtual experience of London’s underground social scene will include:

  • An overview of how the global prohibition movement, implications of the First World War, and licensing restrictions forced London’s social scene underground
  • The story of American bartenders and customers fleeing prohibition arrived in London in droves — so much so that the American bar at the Savoy Hotel was dubbed the “49th State of the USA”
  • How club owners — such as the infamous Kate Meyrick, owner of the ‘43’ — were willing to push the boundaries of the law in the face of imprisonment and the wrath of a Home Secretary who had declared a “War on Nightclubs”
  • The police scandal that brought the Metropolitan Police’s integrity and methods into question
  • The rise of the Bottle Party and further crack downs of the late 1930s as the police attempted to “cleanse” London of illegal drinking — as well as the clubs that welcomed Queer, Black, and Jewish customers
  • Rarely seen photographs, ephemera, and film clips of the time period
  • Where to experience 1920s and 30s bars in London today, and some classic cocktail recipes from the period

Afterward, we’ll have a Q&A session with Lucy — any and all questions about London’s cocktail culture are welcomed and encouraged!

Booking and details are available on their website.

 

 

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New Book About Early Waugh Love Interest

Posted on January 19, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

A new book has appeared featuring one of Waugh’s love interests of the 1930s. This is entitled The Many Lives and Loves of Hazel Lavery and is described on its cover as a Novel. Here’s an excerpt from a review in The Times by Sophie Grenham based on an interview of the author Lois Cahall:

The American journalist and bestselling author Lois Cahall is unusually jittery for someone who is used to interviews. A few years ago, she set about writing a novel about Hazel Lavery, the wife and muse of the Belfast-born painter John Lavery, and the rumoured lover of Michael Collins, who played a pivotal role in Ireland’s war of independence. Cahall was daunted by the prospect of fictionalising this very Irish story. “I’m nervous because this book is about someone else,” she says. “It’s my responsibility to the Irish.”

Lavery was the daughter of a Chicago industrialist of Irish descent, and an artist, a great beauty and society figure. When her father died suddenly, she and her family travelled around Europe, and it was in Brittany that she first met John Lavery, who was considerably older. She married him a few years later. She is immortalised in more than 40 of John’s works, and her face even appeared on Irish banknotes. Cahall’s novel, The Many Lives and Loves of Hazel Lavery, is inspired by the relationships that shaped her and her role in a crucial moment for Anglo-Irish relations…

Cahall was born and raised in Boston and now lives near Manhattan. She sees parallels between her own life story and that of Lavery. After Cahall’s father left the family when she was a toddler, she was educated by nuns in a convent boarding school. Her mother banned her from discussing her father’s Irish heritage, so it wasn’t until she was ten and a family friend brought her to a St Patrick’s Day parade that she discovered what she calls “big Irish energy”.

“I think when you’re Irish your country is always with you,” she says. “When famous Irish people do interviews, they love wherever they’re from. The people are proud of their history and the old and the new weaves together. I feel a sense of loyalty, and I’m all about loyalty.”

It was Cahall’s friend who brought Lavery to her attention. “Lois, you have to write this book because Hazel had this incredible life with fascinating friends and lovers,” she told her. “She’s you, only from another country.” At the time Downton Abbey and Outlander were two of the biggest shows on television, and Cahall is a fan of grand, sweeping stories with a bit of history thrown in.

Lavery entertained many influential people at her London home, including Winston and Clementine Churchill, Cecil Beaton, JM Barrie and Evelyn Waugh. Cahall also has a glittering social circle; she worked for the author James Patterson after she sought his advice when starting her Palm Beach Book Festival ten years ago. She also founded the Cape Cod Book Festival, which celebrated its inaugural year in 2024. Cahall has also enjoyed friendships with Salman Rushdie and Colin Firth. “I didn’t see these people as famous. I saw them as colleagues,” she tells me. “I’m not someone who would ask for an autograph. I’d be on the arm of someone giving the autograph.”…

Waugh met Hazel Lavery in the socializing he enjoyed after the success of Vile Bodies.  The occasion was a dinner party given by Emerald Cunard. There followed an affair of some sort, but it seems to have been relatively brief according to Waugh’s biographers. Hazel was 16 years his senior and the wife of a well known painter who was nearly twice as many years her senior. Their “affair”, if that is what it was, seems to have been sufficiently memorable to cause Waugh to dedicate Remote People (1931) to her. How much of their liaison is described in Cahall’s new book is not discussed in The Times’ review. The most detailed description probably is that contained in the Selina Hastings biography pp. 245-46. Here’s an excerpt:

…[Hazel] had a reputation for what some described as nymphomania, others less censoriously as excessive romantic attachments, and for a time she pursued Evelyn with ardour. He, although slightly embarrassed by her flamboyant attentions, was nonetheless flattered, and quite ready to enjoy a brief liaison. He took her to tea with his parents and allowed her to drive him about when he had errands to do. But he soon grew bored by the hysterical demands, rebuffing her unkindly, behaviour which, when Hazel died in 1935, caused him to suffer remorse. He had a Mass said for her which he attended very early in the morning as a penance.

The new book is available here in hardback, paperback and digital editions. An earlier book (Hazel: A Life of Hazel Lavery) written by Sinead McCoole and published as a “biography” in 1997 is available at this link.

 

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Roundup: Television and Weblogs

Posted on January 14, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–Blogger Andrew Kern has posted on Substack an article praising Waugh’s war novel Men at Arms. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Evelyn Waugh wrote better than any dead or living Briton from the 20th century. He tells stories that incorporate but transcend his perspectives. He understands how other people view the world and treats them all with the same level of respect: that is to say, he treats them all as farcical (far’s’cl for you sailors) excuses of a broken race that somehow carry a well-hidden grace visible only to those who wish to see it.

Also, his sentences are so continually (not continuously, I hasten to add) perfect that when I find one that disappoints, I know it must be an error, even a typo, and I rejoice with a joy so full of vainglory that I rush to my nearest-at-hand pencil with the enthusiasm of a man who has found the ash on which was built a royal palace.

Men At Arms launches Waugh’s three volume Sword of Honour trilogy, and I read it last year. It tells the story of Guy Crouchback, an English recusant1 who spends the 1930’s in Italy after his wife divorces him, ending any hope that he might preserve his ancient line. His life drifts along the Italian coast like a sedate and sedated yacht. As Hitler and Mussolini rise to power, he is otherwise occupied. He knows Hitler is bad and he regards Mussolini as a chancer. But he is sedate and sedated, like a yacht floating in the harbor below his family’s ancient villa…

–A Portuguese website (naoeimprensa.com) has an article by Adaubam Pires about the 1960 BBC interview of Evelyn Waugh which is now available over YouTube.com in Portuguese language markets. Here is an excerpt:

…Evelyn Waugh was not an easy guy. Our “favorite villain,” as Ronald B. Griggs, the greatest translator of Waugh in these parts, aptly defined it. Irascible and temperamental, an old-school conservative , the writer had decided in the early 1950s to exchange the hustle and bustle of London society for the isolation of a country mansion . What led him in 1960 to abandon his much-loved country peace to go and show his face on national television in a program that looked more like a police interrogation?

“Poverty,” as Waugh himself explains during the interview. “We were both hired to talk in this deliriously happy way.” Although his works continued to be published and sold, in the last years of his life the writer found himself under financial pressure, which led him to agree to participate in interviews. It must not have been easy, in fact, to support a family of six children in a large mansion with eight suites, six living rooms, a wine cellar and a garage for five cars.

The 1960 interview is said to have been Waugh’s television debut. And it was in front of journalist John Freeman, a former Labour MP who had left politics to become the host of the BBC’s Face to Face programme, where he had a (bad) reputation for embarrassing his guests with his inquisitive style. For a newcomer, Waugh didn’t do too badly.

But watching the interview left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was happy to hear from the author himself a series of interesting details about his life and work. On the other hand, the interviewer’s impertinent and derogatory attitude towards his interviewee left me annoyed and frustrated. I was annoyed because the questions were directed at Waugh in a rude and offensive manner, without the slightest concern for establishing a minimally friendly relationship with the interviewee. I was frustrated because, in his eagerness to read his previously formulated questions, the interviewer moved on to the next subject without letting Waugh elaborate on any topic, leaving the feeling that, at times, he didn’t even care to listen to what Waugh had to say. How could I miss the opportunity to let one of the greatest prose writers in the English language delve deeper and ramble lyrically in his answers?

This harassment is handled politely by Waugh—up to a point. Waugh’s instinctive hostility toward the interviewer’s lack of decorum begins to take the form of increasingly evasive responses as the interview progresses. When he realizes that the interviewer is more interested in attacking his Catholicism and social status than in actually discussing his novels, Waugh begins to answer all impertinent questions briefly and tersely, whenever possible with answers laden with sarcasm. And it is these rude responses from Waugh that make this interview worth its weight in gold…

Translation is by Google.

—The Guardian has an article about an upcoming TV series that may be of interest:

…It’s their triumphs and travails that form the basis of the historical drama House of Guinness, from Peaky Blinders showrunner Steven Knight, which is due on our screens next year. As befits the drink that made the family’s name, it is the story of stout hard work with dark undertones and conspicuous froth on top.

The dynasty was established by Arthur Guinness, the son of a farmer, who founded the brewery in 1759. Its position was secured by his third son, Benjamin, who became the richest man in Ireland.

But by the 1920s decadence had arrived in the shape of Bryan Guinness, heir to the barony of Moyne, and one of the bright young things, the upper-class bohemians satirised by Evelyn Waugh. He married Diana Mitford who left him for Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader and acolyte of Adolf Hitler…

It is not clear from available information when this will be televised but it seems likely it will be available on Netflix later this year.

–An entertainment website (Metro.co.uk) discusses a new BBC TV production (Dope Girls) that includes depiction of the woman on whom Waugh based Ma Mayfield:

Dope Girls stars Julianne Nicholson as Kate Galloway, a single mother who establishes a nightclub amidst the hedonistic uproar of post-World War One London and embraces a life of criminal activities in order to be able to provide for her daughter Evie ….

The series is based on real life figures including Billie Carleton, Brilliant Chang, Edgar Manning, and Kate Meyrick. The later was known as the ‘Night Club Queen’ who owned several nightclubs in London in the 1920s and was believed to have earned around ÂŁ500,000 (ÂŁ17 million today) from her hotspots. Throughout her life she served five prison sentences and was the inspiration for the character Ma Mayfield in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited…

The 6-episode  series will be available on the BBC later this year.

–Blogger europhilevicar.com has posted on his web diary a discussion of Waugh’s works that he has read over the past year.  You will need to scroll down to the entry entitled “Through a glass darkly–138” to begin this discussion with Remote People and Black Mischief. Here’s an excerpt:

…Black Mischief, published in 1932, also leans on the Abyssinian experience. The primitive cruelty, treachery, and cannibalism of Azania are confronted by the young Emperor Seth’s commitment to Modernity and the New Age. The British-educated Seth wants to put his Oxford degree to good use by dragging this primitive country into the twentieth century. And in this endeavour he is assisted by Basil Seal, an upper class chancer and contemporary at Oxford, and by the slippery Armenian trader Mr Krikor Youkoumian. Other characters include Sir Samson Courteney, the ineffectual Head of the British Delegation, and his romantically inclined daughter Prudence;  General Connolly, a former Irish game warden, now Head of the Army; Connolly’s local wife, known as the ‘Black Bitch’; and Monsieur Balloon, the French freemason Consul.

Azania is not Abyssinia, but is based rather on Zanzibar. And Seth is certainly not a portrait of Ras Tafari, the new Emperor, who appears in Waugh’s travel writings as an exotic but enigmatic figure.. Where Haile Selassie was seen as a distinctly African figure, proud to be the only independent native monarch in Africa, Seth is wholly divorced from his African culture, a fervent believer in the concept of ‘Progress’. Waugh portrays Seth as a man with no discernible religious faith, who is confronted by a world of treachery and fear. The spy scuttling away from the door is a recurring image in Black Mischief.

The book was written in a stop-start manner, partly at the hotel at Chagford, partly at the Lygon family’s country seat at Madresfield, as Waugh juggled an increasing number of journalistic and reviewing commitments. It was published in October 1932 and attracted hugely varied reviews. Favourable reviews in the Spectator and the Telegraph and the Listener found the book original and well-written, with an increased seriousness, and tinged with Eliot’s Waste Land vision of western society, an unsentimental pessimism. But other reviewers were unconvinced, using word like vapid and fatuous. James Agate in the Express wrote: “‘this book is an extravaganza 
 I assume that Mr Waugh’s plan was to think of an island of cannibals to whose vile bodies he could add Lottie Crump’s clientele out of an earlier novel. The book will be deemed wildly funny by the intelligentsia, and there is always a chance it is too clever for me.”

I don’t recall what I made of this book reading it some sixty-plus years ago in Lamb A dayroom. But these decades later I find the book funny but slight. An insubstantial work, easily read and discarded. And I surprised too that Waugh has not been denounced for his casual [but period] use of the nigger word…

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Roundup: Renewed Interest in Rosemary Tonks

Posted on January 8, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–The London Review of Books reviews the reprints of three of the later novels by poet-novelist Rosemary Tonks. She wrote during the period 1963-1980.  After a rather difficult life, she stopped writing in 1980 to become a fundamentalist Christian, dying in 2014.  Here is a summary of her novels in the LRB review by Ruby Hamilton:

…Before she gave it all up, and renounced poetry to live alone by the sea as a born-again Christian fundamentalist, there were also the novels. Six acid comedies of bad manners, at least as splenetic as the poems, if not as fĂȘted. A faultline divided her prolific 1960s: on the one side, Opium Fogs and Emir (both 1963), two quasi-Waughian works which have never been reprinted; on the other, four semi-autobiographical romps – The Bloater (1968), Businessmen as Lovers (1969), The Way out of Berkeley Square (1970) and The Halt during the Chase [1972]– which are now available again as Vintage Classics. She claimed not to care much for them (‘the English like their porridge,’ she responded when her editor told her of the fifth novel’s success), but spending too much time with Tonks will teach you not to take anything she says too seriously. Whichever way you look at them – as confessions of an irrepressible ego; as experiments in whether or not English satire can bear the weight of Baudelairean malaise; as works of a woman who couldn’t turn a forgettable phrase, no matter her insistence that she just dashed them off to make ‘a lot of red-hot money’ – the novels are thrillingly strange things. She had the knack.

The novel entitled The Bloater apparently had been reprinted earlier than the three now reviewed.  Unfortunately, the two early “Waughian” novels are not among those so far republished. Since both of these are now listed as “collectible” ($500+), we may hope to see them soon as reprints. The LRB review does suggest Waugh’s influence in one of the later, now reprinted novels:

The miraculous thing about the clairvoyants and psychics in The Halt During the Chase is that their advice–not least, packing Sophie off to a chateau in Alencon–actually works. She is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown who never reaches the brink. At the end of the novel she is ‘cut loose’ and ready to embark on a ‘new life’. It’s striking how happily Tonks’s novels end, when you set them beside Waugh’s death-filled Vile Bodies (by suicide, motor racing and dropping from a chandelier) or the wonderful dispatch in Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (now there’s a woman Tonks could love): ‘And last of all leapt Mr Trent-Garby, who catching his foot in the ruined flower box, fell headlong and, I regret to say, was killed.”…

Tonks’s Wikipedia entry also notes that “her highly personal style … at times approached the tone of Evelyn Waugh in its cynical observations of urban living, Tonks as a novelist had a mixed critical reception at best, although her critics admit that her grasp of the English language and her sense of London are sharp.”

–The Italian edition of Vanity Fair magazine has posted a list of travel books it  recommends to its readers. The list includes Waugh’s A Tourist in Africa which was recently translated into Italian. Here’s the description (translation from Italian by Google):

Setting out without a precise destination is Evelyn Waugh‘s philosophy , always looking for confirmation of the prejudices that afflict him: the more indefensible an opinion is, the more he will champion it. To be funny he has to complain about something, and as soon as he sets out on a journey fate promptly begins to plot against him. In the guise of an old man full of ailments and equipped with these credentials, he decides to spend the winter in an Africa that is changing: and here he is, the innocent abroad . He comes across picturesque characters that he barely deigns to glance at, he stumbles into absurd situations that do not affect him, or into unlikely adventures that he knows how to present to the reader like no other. [Highlighting in original.]

—The Guardian has an article by Harry Taylor entitled: “London is Europe’s most congested city, with drivers sitting in traffic an average 101 hours last year.” Here’s an excerpt:

…The capital has been renowned for its traffic problems, with Piccadilly Circus becoming a byword for somewhere chaotically busy. In his 1938 novel Scoop, the author Evelyn Waugh satirised the junction’s traffic, describing it as “still as a photograph, broken and undisturbed”.

–A story in The Spectator by Lydia Schmitt is entitled “Private schools were ruined long ago.” Here’s an excerpt:

There is a story in private education circles of an apoplectic father who raged to the bursar that he was unable to find a prep school for his son ‘without central-heating’. It is probably apocryphal, but it reminds us of the mad heights to which some private schools have stretched: rowing lakes, glitzy IT centres, West End-style theatres and Olympic-sized swimming pools, no doubt necessary for storing the ever-growing associated fees.

It wasn’t always this way. My entire 1950s schooling was an exercise in back-to-basics privation, fostering a now-fashionable ‘resilience’ and ‘green’ ethos, unnoticed by us pupils of those distant days. My small Dorset school, where it was not uncommon in winter for the inkwells to freeze over, produced two Dames of the British Empire.

I visited it a few years ago, to find it still surprisingly unbeholden to the current expectations of the entitled, continuing to use the freezing bathrooms with huge rusting enamelled iron bathtubs. I doubt the washing regime continues, however. We small girls were plunged into these baths three at a time, twice a week, as the tepid water became increasingly soup-like…

If you were deemed ‘peaky’ you queued again for a spoon of Radio Malt. No one had a nut allergy. Hands were inspected before lunch, and you were dispatched to a chilly sink with a pumice stone if yours were inky. Once, my father, posted in the Middle East, sent the school a box of Jaffa oranges. We were transfixed as they were handed out, rather like Evelyn Waugh’s children seeing their first bananas, though brutally devoured in front of them by their father.

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David Lodge (1935-2025) R.I.P.

Posted on January 4, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

The Society regrets to announce that its Honorary President, David Lodge, died earlier this week on 1 January 2025 at the age of 89. He was a few weeks away from his 90th birthday. There are several obituaries in today’s papers, of which that in the Daily Telegraph (unsigned) is probably the most detailed. Here are the introductory paragraphs:

David Lodge, who has died aged 89, was too skilled a novelist simply to replay his own life in his fiction, but he wrote repeatedly in his prize-winning and popular books about two subjects close to his heart: academic life and Roman Catholicism; his attraction to and affection for both did not, however, prevent him from casting a comic, critical eye over them.

“Each of my novels,” he once said, “corresponds to a particular phase or aspect of my own life: for example, going to the University of California at the height of the Student Revolution, being an English Catholic at a period of great change in the Church, getting on to the international academic conference circuit; but this does not mean they are not autobiographical in any simple, straightforward sense.  I begin with a hunch that what I have experienced or observed had some representative–i.e., more than merely private–significance that could be brought out by means of a fictional story.”

Lodge spent 27 years teaching at Birmingham University, retiring as Professor of English in 1987. Along with Professor Malcolm Bradbury of the University of East Anglia–whom he referred to as “my closest friend”–he more or less invented the modern “campus novel.” More playful than satirical, it wore its seriousness of purpose lightly, and was always set amid the concrete sprawl of Britain’s  burgeoning “new” universities of the 1960s…

The Guardian also has a detailed article which is written by literary critic and scholar John Mullan. Here are the concluding paragraphs:

…In 2008 he published what was, in many ways, his most autobiographical novel, and one of his best, Deaf Sentence. Lodge had started losing his hearing in his mid-40s. Up to this point, only those closest to him had realised that his partial deafness had deeply influenced him. It contributed to his decision to retire from academia and turned him in on himself. Struggling to keep up with conversations, he said, had stopped him being amusing. Lodge often spoke of his feelings of anxiety, undiminished by literary success or academic standing. Yet the deafness that depressed him in life became comic in his novel.

Admirers of Lodge’s novels were often surprised to find him, in person, dolefully reflective. This was the spirit of his memoir, Quite a Good Time to Be Born, published in 2015. Covering the period from his birth to his breakthrough, at the age of 40, with Changing Places, it gives (despite the title) a glum and minutely circumstantial account of growing up a Roman Catholic in the 1940s and 50s.

Lodge looks back with some amazement at his younger self’s respect for Catholic doctrine. Two further volumes of memoirs, covering later periods of his life, followed. Writer’s Luck (2018), should have relished his middle years of celebrity and success, but is more precise about the small disappointments of his literary life. Varying Degrees of Success (2020), covering the years after academia, lets us know just how wearying the business of writing can be.

His last published work of fiction was The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up (2016), a collection of short stories mostly composed between the 1950s and 90s. Humorously fable-like, they serve as a reminder of this melancholy man’s comic instinct. Fiction allowed him to combine his literary-critical intelligence with a gift for observing absurdities, in order to fashion his own peculiarly bleak brand of comedy…

The obituary in today’s issue of The Times is also worth reading and elaborates on some of the same points as those in the other papers. Here are the concluding paragraphs from The Times’ unsigned article:

…Lodge’s campus novels continued to live long in the memory, aided by successful television adaptations of Small World in 1988, and Nice Work (by Lodge himself) in 1989. The latter won the Royal Television Society award for best serial. Lodge also won plaudits for his 1994 adaptation of Dickens’s novel Martin Chuzzlewit, with Tom Wilkinson as a magnificent Pecksniff.

Lodge’s wife, Mary, predeceased him in 2022. He is survived by their three children, Julia, Stephen and Christopher.

His novels remain relevant, ready to entertain a new generation, and he was inordinately pleased that the fictional universities of Limerick and Gloucestershire are now real ones as a result of life imitating his art…

Hopefully, the BBC will take this opportunity to recognize David Lodge’s heritage by replaying one or more of the adaptations mentioned in The Times’ article.

If you look at the photo of the Society’s 2011 Conference delegates on this website’s home page, Prof. Lodge is standing near the front in a light colored trench coat next to a delegate to his right (the viewer’s left) with very red hair. Paula Byrne is a few delegates to his left just behind those in the front row. Obituaries have also appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as well as several other regional and national papers in both the US and Britain and elsewhere.

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New Year’s Roundup

Posted on December 31, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–Writing in The Spectator, Druin Burch reviews the press coverage of the Lucy Letby case (recently convicted of murdering babies in her care) and recalls the case of an earlier nurse (Benjamin Geen) who was also convicted of murder. The writer (a consultant physician, a former junior doctor, and the author of books on history and medicine) was a co-worker of Geen. The article concludes with this:

…Something in the nature of our interest in murderers has a habit of making us forget logic. News, said Evelyn Waugh, is ‘what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.’ It is interesting, of course, to pay some attention to the affairs of the day. But it is wise as well to monitor the nature of one’s motives, and sensible to remember that shallow interests yield shallow insights…

–On the website ndnation.com a post by “BejingIrish” discusses a recent visit to Barcelona. Here’a an excerpt:

…I finally fulfilled my long-postponed ambition to visit [Barcelona] this fabled shrine to Catalan culture and spirit, including naturally a visit to Sagrada Familia, Gaudí’s unfinished masterwork and the city’s iconic symbol. I prepared for the visit by reading Robert Hughes’ masterwork (Barcelona, New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1992) wherein the author describes Sagrada Familia as “
part eye-sore, part inspiration
one is fascinated by the thing in the way one is fascinated by costume jewelry”. Like many others Hughes comes away wishing it would just get done. DalĂ­ thought it should be left unfinished and covered by a transparent geodesic dome. On a visit to the construction site in 1930, Evelyn Waugh suggested “that it would be a graceful action on the part of someone who is a little wrong in the head to pay for its completion”. Me? It’s interesting, I guess, but it’s not the first thing I think of when I think of Barcelona. I think about a restaurant off Ramblas where I had lunch that concluded with prune ice cream. But, first of all, I think about that girl in the red shirt.

Waugh’s description of his visit to Sagrada Familia was included in his travel book Labels after having appeared a few months earlier in Architectural Review.  It is reprinted in EAR, v 26 CWEW, p. 244.

–The National Review invited its staff to pick the books they most enjoyed reading in 2024. Here is one of the selections:

Mark Antonio Wright, executive editor
I don’t know how I managed to spend a decade in journalism without ever having read Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, which may very well be the funniest, zaniest book that I’ve read since Catch-22. Waugh’s gonzo satire of the racket that is Big-J journalism — a case of mistaken identity sends the wrong Mr. Boot out from England as a war correspondent to the country of Ishmaelia to cover what could turn out to be (for the press barons) a very promising war — is simply genius. No, the words “fake news” do not appear in the book. But I think Waugh would have understood the phrase. He was writing in a time before the Web and, indeed, before Fox News prime time, but anyone who has spent a moment perusing Twitter or CNN.com can see that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Sensationalism is the press’s lodestar, which means that sometimes a story is too good to check. Scoop, dear friends, is too good a novel to miss.

–The Los Angeles-based Roman Catholic religious journal Angelus has posted an article by Russell Shaw that compares Swift’s A Modest Proposal and Waugh’s The Loved One. Here is the conclusion:

…As the story [of The Loved One] unfolds, a message of profound seriousness emerges. In a culture obsessed with death but entirely without faith, the difference between these two cemeteries is negligible. And one way to escape the implications of that unsettling state of affairs is by cosmeticizing death.

Whispering Glades is the temple of a kind of worldly mysticism in which fear of death and fascination with it come together in something unspeakably grotesque. It’s religious all right, but this religion bears no resemblance to Christianity. The ritualistic preparation of corpses, the lavish Slumber Rooms, and the elaborate pomposity of the cemetery grounds combine as setting for a monstrous secular paganism focused on death.

The message underlying “The Loved One” remains as fresh and lively now as it was three quarters of a century ago. But it’s important to understand that message. At a key moment in the story, a cab driver passing a Catholic cemetery casually remarks that Catholics have their own way of handling all that. It’s the sole apologetical remark Waugh allows himself — and especially appropriate at Christmas. For the horrors of secularization are not found in mortuary procedures but in a world without faith. Whereas true faith rejoices in knowing that the life we celebrate at the stable in Bethlehem is the real answer to death.

The story also appears in other religious papers. The full article is available at this link.

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Waugh’s Christmas: 100 Years On

Posted on December 24, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

A few weeks ago, the following Twitter message was posted:

Evelyn Waugh was the least Christmassy of beings. ‘A poor Christmas Day’ he wrote in his diary on 25th December 1919. ‘Like birthdays, Christmas gets duller and duller. Soon it will be merely a day when the shops are most inconveniently shut.’ He was 16 at the time.

The posting is accompanied by a photo-shopped version of the well known portrait of Waugh by Henry Lamb. It’s well worth a look.

Waugh resumed his diary in June 1924 and left this description of his Christmas that year:

“Christmas Day 1924

I have decided to try to grow a moustache because I cannot afford any new clothes for several years and I want to see some change in myself. Also if I am to be a schoolmaster it will help to impress the urchins with my age. I look so intolerably young now that I have had to give up regular excessive drinking. Christmas Day always makes me feel a little sad; for one reason because strangely enough my few romances have always culminated in Christmas week–Luned [Jacobs], Richard [Pares], Alastair [Graham]. Now with Alastair a thousand miles away and my heart leaden and my future drearily uncertain things are not as they were. My only letter this morning was notice of a vacancy from Truman & Knightley. There are coming to dinner tonight Stella Rhys and Audrey Lucas and Philippa Fleming. I should scarcely think it will be a jovial evening.” Diaries, p. 194.

As it turned out, according to the next entry, it “wasn’t at all a bad evening.”

Merry Christmas from the Evelyn Waugh Society.

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Winter Solstice Roundup

Posted on December 22, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–Novelist Robert Harris has recommended the best 5 collections of letters for the Wall Street Journal. Those of Evelyn Waugh are included:

Born in London in 1903, Evelyn Waugh was a reactionary whose distaste for the modern world included the telephone and the typewriter. It is our good fortune that for 50 years Waugh preferred to communicate with the outside world by handwritten letter. Into these compositions he poured the same combination of elegance, wit, satire, snobbery and insight as he put into his fiction. In one classic, Waugh sees off a proposal from Life magazine to publish a series of photographs based on his characters alongside excerpts from his novels: “I have read your letter of yesterday with curiosity and re-read it with compassion. I am afraid you are unfamiliar with the laws of my country.” In another, he describes Winston Churchill’s ebullient son, Randolph, in wartime Yugoslavia, whom Waugh tried to keep quiet by betting he couldn’t read the entire Bible: “Unhappily it has not had the result we hoped. He has never read any of it before and is hideously excited; keeps reading quotations aloud: ‘I say I bet you didn’t know this came in the Bible: bring down my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave’ or merely slapping his side & chortling ‘God, isn’t God a s—!'”

The editor Mark Amory is identified and the publication year of  1980. He might have mentioned later collections of letters between Waugh and both Nancy Mitford (1996) and Diana Cooper (1991). These contained letters from both parties.

–David Samuels writing in the American Jewish magazine called The Tablet (not to be confused with the Roman Catholic one by that name in the UK) has written a long article trying to explain how Barack Obama and David Axelrod built a system to control what used to be called public opinion only to see it fall apart in the recent election. There are frequent references in the essay to literary sources which provide relief from the lengthy political analysis. Here’s an example:

…By this late date in Western cultural history, the modern is itself a notably dated category. Whether it is a person or a thing or a style, we know exactly how it behaves, and how we are supposed to react. The modern is a character in an early Evelyn Waugh novel, unflappable in the face of the new. Then there is the conservative, who rejects the new in favor of the ancient verities of the Greeks or the Church. Both figures are rightfully comic, with an accompanying tinge of the tragic, or else they appear to be the other way around. The verdict is in the eye of the beholder, meaning you and me.

The permission structure machine that Barack Obama and David Axelrod built to replace the Democratic Party was in its essence neither modern nor conservative, though.

The article is worth reading if you have half an hour to spare but I must confess that I have no greater comprehension of what a “permission structure” may be after reading it than I did before. Here is a link to the article.

–Oxford University have posted a brief profile by one of its faculty members who writes an explanation of the sources and influences of her recent novel. This is entitled Fundamentally and is written by Dr Nussaibah Younis, a member of the Faculty of English.  Here’s an excerpt:

In my debut novel Fundamentally – a dark comedy about a UN program to deradicalize ISIS brides – there is only one scene set in Oxford, and it’s an absolutely miserable one. I feel a bit guilty about that. Though I had ups and downs as a student, my time as a Modern History and English student at Merton College was amongst the happiest – and certainly the most formative – of my life…

I had … become quite disillusioned by the international aid industry and wanted to shed light on the nightmarish difficulties faced by people trying to ‘build peace’ in a foreign country. At times my work in peacebuilding had been farcical, had reached comic levels of absurdity, and it was ripe for satire. I love the way Evelyn Waugh skewers the war correspondent circus in Scoop, and the hilarious dragging of the BBC in W1A, and I wanted to do something similar for the UN.

Thus was born Fundamentally. It’s a dark comedy about Nadia, a heartbroken academic tasked with implementing a deradicalization program for ISIS brides. Working alongside a cast of fools and misfits, she becomes engrossed by a hilarious and foul-mouthed ISIS teen bride from East London and is forced to make an extreme choice…

There are more extended discussions about her other two novels at this link.

–The Los Angeles Review of Books has published an interview of novelist Michael Idov in which he mostly discusses his latest novel. This is apparently about spies, but he opens with this discussion of his first novel Ground Up (2009):

Q. The story of how you published your first novel is somewhat miraculous. You were contacted by Nora Ephron, who offered to introduce you to her agent.

A. It’s as close to a fairy tale as things get in this line of work. This was 2005. I had a kind of funny essay in Slate about my experience trying to open a coffee shop called CafĂ© Trotsky on the Lower East Side. (This was back when you could still put your email address at the end of a story without getting death threats, and when you only checked your email once a day, after you got home.) The day after Slate ran the story, I checked my email and was absolutely shocked to see an email from Nora Ephron. I thought it was a prank at first. She wrote that she thought the story would make a great book or movie, and went on to introduce me to her agent, Amanda “Binky” Urban, who is still my agent to this day. So yeah, I’ve been incredibly lucky.

Q. Was Amanda the one who suggested you write the story in the form of a novel?

A. The story made some noise, so a few agents contacted me, but they all wanted me to write a self-help book, like a “how-not-to-do-business” guide. I had zero interest in that. I thought, perhaps stupidly, that this was my chance to write a cool, satirical novel. The moment I’d tell them I saw it as “modern-day Evelyn Waugh,” they were like, “Oh, I see—he’s insane. Bye!” Binky was the only one who said, “If you feel passionate about it, why not?”

So I took a leap of faith, wrote the whole thing the way I wanted, and it ended up at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It wasn’t very popular, to be honest—though it did tick a few “success” boxes like having the film rights optioned to HBO. The most surprising outcome was that the Russian version became a bestseller. I had literally translated it for the private bragging rights; I just wanted to be the second writer after Nabokov to publish something in English and then republish it in Russian in my own translation…

The complete interview can be read here.

—Anglotopia, a UK-based internet literary/cultural website, has posted an article in its newsletter relating to the various presentations of Brideshead Revisited in book, TV, and film versions.  this is by Janna Wong Healy. Here are the opening paragraphs:

I was not alive in 1945, when Evelyn Waugh’s highly revered and most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, was published.  As an English major in college, I had heard about this thoughtful, beautifully written story of friendship, love, and religion
yet didn’t read it.  In 1982, the talk around town (I live in Los Angeles, and my “town” is Hollywood) was all about the extraordinary translation of Waugh’s novel by Granada Television for ITV starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews and featuring such famous co-stars as Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom, and John Gielgud.  I not only opted against reading the book, I watched the first episode but ultimately decided against watching the rest of the show.

In retrospect, I was foolish for not jumping onto the Brideshead bandwagon.  But, I have redeemed myself.  I just finished reading the novel (or, to be precise, I listened to the lovely voice of Jeremy Irons as he read it to me).  I then devoured the series (available on BritBox), and finally, after seeing the movie in its theatrical run in 2008, I rewatched it (available to rent on Amazon) for this article.

I am filled with remorse that it took me so long to truly and completely discover this masterpiece of literature.  Hopefully, you are smarter than I, and you got swept up in the story of Charles Ryder’s friendship with the Flytes of Brideshead when the book was first published or the series first aired. But if you haven’t, I urge you to explore and enjoy Mr. Waugh’s enduring story.

At this point, you may be wondering what the difference is between the book, the series and the movie and, particularly, which one you should invest your time in.  Allow me to be your guide…

 

 

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Roundup: Euthanasia, Stiff-upper-lips, and Feminism

Posted on December 13, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–American journalist Roger Kimball, writing in The Spectator, offers his views on certain aspects of legislation proposed by the new Labour Government:

…What if you are old, sick or just plain inconvenient? Starmer’s government has a plan for you, too. It’s called euthanasia, sometimes known as mercy killing, but what unsophisticated rubes like me would call state-sanctioned murder. Lawmakers in the House of Commons voted by 330 to 275 to support the assisted dying bill. The idea was outlined in by Evelyn Waugh in his brief novel Love Among the Ruins. “In the New Britain which we are Building,” one of Waugh’s characters says, “there are no criminals. There are only victims of inadequate social services.”

Waugh’s protagonist is Miles Plastic, a sort of porter at one of the scores of euthanasia centers dotting the country. Although not part of the original 1948 health service, Waugh explains, such facilities had by degrees become “key” departments, “designed to attract votes from the aged and mortally sick. Under the Bevan-Eden Coalition the Service came into general use and won instant popularity. The Union of Teachers was pressing for its application to difficult children.” Of course, Waugh was a satirist. Children would never be eligible for this “service.” But how about the Canadian judge that this year cleared the way for a twenty-seven-year-old woman to end her life with the help of her doctors? Perhaps this was the sort of thing that Nigel Farage had in mind when he wrote that “I voted against the assisted dying bill, not out of a lack of compassion but because I fear that the law will widen in scope. If that happens, the right to die may become the obligation to die.” Welfare and palliative care are so expensive. A pill or injection, though, is quick, painless — and cheap.

It is that sort of thought that prompted one wise academic to observe, “Assisted suicide bills are always sold to the public as increasing autonomy and preserving dignity when we all know they do the opposite: they prey on the weakest and most vulnerable among us, precisely by denying their inviolable dignity and seeing them as better off dead”…

The full article is available here.

–Blogger Tyler Cowen has posted a transcript and recording of his recent  podcast interview with Waugh biographer Paula Byrne. Here’s an excerpt:

This was one of the most fun — and funny — CWTs of all time.  But those parts are best experienced in context, so I’ll give you an excerpt of something else:

…COWEN: Your book on Evelyn Waugh, the phrase pops up, and I quote, “naturally fastidious.” Why can it be said that so many British people are naturally fastidious?

BYRNE: Your questions are so crazy. I love it. Did I say that? [laughs]

COWEN: I think Evelyn Waugh said it, not you. It’s in the book.

BYRNE: Give me the context of that.

COWEN: Oh, I’d have to go back and look. It’s just in my memory.

BYRNE: That’s really funny. It’s a great phrase.

COWEN: We can evaluate the claim on its own terms, right?

BYRNE: Yes, we can.

COWEN: I’m not sure they are anymore. It seems maybe they once were, but the stiff-upper-lip tradition seems weaker with time.

BYRNE: The stiff upper lip. Yes, I think Evelyn Waugh would be appalled with the way England has gone. Naturally fastidious, yes, it’s different to reticent, isn’t it? Fastidious — hard to please, it means, doesn’t it? Naturally hard to please. I think that’s quite true, certainly of Evelyn Waugh because he was naturally fastidious. That literally sums him up in a phrase.

COWEN: If I go to Britain as an American, I very much have the feeling that people derive status from having negative opinions more than positive. That’s quite different from this country. Would you agree with that?…

The recording and transcript of the interview (which also includes discussions of other authors such as Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf) are available at this link.

–MIT Press has published a book by Amanda K Greene entitled Glitchy Vision: A Feminist History of the Social Photo. Here’s a description from the press release:

A novel exploration of popular photographic media cultures in 1930s Europe through a feminist lens—and how visual social media changes what it means to be human both then and now.

Glitchy Vision takes a feminist approach to media history to examine how photographic social media cultures change human bodies and the experience of being human. To illuminate these glitches, Greene  focuses on the inevitable distortions that arise from looking at the past through the lens of the present. Treating these distortions as tools as opposed to obstacles, Greene uncovers new ways of viewing social media cultures of the past, while also revealing parallels between historical contexts and our contemporary digital media environment.

Greene uses three “born-digital keywords”—real time, algorithmic filters, and sousveillance—to examine photographic media environments in and around 1930s Europe. Each chapter of the book places one of the keywords in dialogue with an unconventional archive of popular “feminized” cultural artifacts and technological innovations from this historical moment that have been overlooked as critical resources for media studies: Evelyn Waugh’s bestselling novel Vile Bodies (1930) and photographic reproductions for the tabloid press; Lee Miller’s war photography for British Vogue and glamourous photo-retouching techniques; and the Mass-Observation Movement’s surrealist anthropology.

Glitchy Vision provides new strategies for reading history that show how small shifts in the circuits that connect bodies and media affect what it means to be human both in the past and today.

Chapter 2 is entitled “Real Time: Vile Bodies, Tabloids, Melancholia.” A link to a PDF copy is available in the release but a subscription may be required.

–Several publications are posting their Best Books of 2024. Among those posted in the Catholic World Report is this of interest from British academic Andrew E Clark: “Holly Ordway’s Tolkien’s Faith and Barbara Cooke’s Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford belong on the shelves of anyone who loves these two British Catholic masters.”

–A discussion of A Handful of Dust (both the film and book) appears on the website BookBarmy.com. Here’s an excerpt:

…Seldom do I watch a film before I’ve read the book, but in this case I found both equally riveting. The film is well acted and beautifully filmed. It follows the novel fairly closely but it was a sad and desperate story

The book is deeper, with a more satirical (and often funny) critique of the social classes in Britain during that time period. Mr. Waugh seems to both criticize and admire English aristocrats, and he is especially fascinated with their homes and architecture — not to mention the Catholic church. This makes for a seductive combination, which left me feeling I had inhabited the society described.

Where the book fell a little flat, was the characters didn’t come to life as well as in the film. Or, perhaps I just couldn’t help visualizing the actors in the film. The book does do a wonderful job of mixing both the tragedy and comedy. The characters are so hapless and awful but with Mr. Waugh’s brilliant writing and descriptions you can’t stop reading. (It was also interesting to read the alternative ending Waugh wrote.)

As I put the book back on my shelf next to my other Evelyn Waughs’, I noticed my copy of Brideshead Revisited, and realized I had done the same thing with that novel. First I saw the infamous and beautiful film, and was so transformed by it, I had to immediately read the novel.

The full article can be read here.

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Advent Roundup

Posted on December 8, 2024 by Jeffrey Manley

–D J Taylor has written a thoughtful essay on the current status of literary biography. This is posted in The Critic Magazine. Here are the introductory paragraphs:

Q. Who, just under a century ago, wrote the following, and about whom?

“No doubt the old-fashioned biography will return, and, with the years, we shall once more learn to assist with our fathers’ decorum at the lying-in-state of our great men 
 Meanwhile, we must keep our tongue in our cheek, must we not, for fear it should loll out and reveal the idiot? We have discovered a jollier way of honouring our dead. The corpse has become a marionette. With bells on its fingers and wires on its toes it is jigged about to a “period dance” of our own piping; and who is not amused?”

In fact, this pointed little homily on the biographer’s art is taken from the preface to Evelyn Waugh’s Rossetti: His Life and Works (1928), published a few months before his debut novel Decline and Fall, and the fellow practitioner he is taking to task turns out to be Lytton Strachey, proud author of Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921).

If one aspect of Waugh’s dislike of Strachey is generational — the inevitable contempt of a man born in 1903 for a man born in 1880 — then another is narrowly aesthetic. Rossetti (specimen sentence: “Turner was seventy-one years old, sinking like one of his own tremendous sunsets in clouds of obscured glory”) is a “romantic” biography; Strachey, alternatively, was an ironist, a debunker and (occasionally) a disparager. Waugh, in holding a few of his rival’s first principles up to scrutiny, is reacting against a reaction.

The Victorian biographers, whom Strachey set out to supplant, had no other urge than to glorify. With one or two conspicuous exceptions, they approached their great men (and very infrequently women) in the spirit of the embalmer, determined to do justice, to take pains, to heap up every last testimonial to the edifying influence their subjects had had on the world…

The complete article is available at this link.

–Penguin Books is sponsoring a series of podcasts promoting its products. Here’s a link to a History Special dealing with the books about WWII as well as several earlier conflicts. This is conducted by Al Murray and James Holland and, among other things, discusses Waugh’s Scoop and Sword of Honour war trilogy. A written transcript is also provided.

–An internet book reviewer (Nicky @ The Bibliophilian) has posted a review of the recently published The Book at War by Andrew Pettegree. Here’s the summary and opening paragraph:

Chairman Mao was a librarian. Stalin was a published poet. Evelyn Waugh served as a commando – before leaving to write Brideshead Revisited. Since the advent of modern warfare, books have all too often found themselves on the frontline. In The Book at War, acclaimed historian Andrew Pettegree traces the surprising ways in which written culture – from travel guides and scientific papers to Biggles and Anne Frank – has shaped, and been shaped, by the conflicts of the modern age. From the American Civil War to the invasion of Ukraine, books, authors and readers have gone to war – and in the process become both deadly weapons and our most persuasive arguments for peace.

Andrew Pettegree’s The Book at War delves into how books, libraries, and literacy more generally have been used in war, in various contexts. There’s a lot to say about the World Wars, and particularly World War II, but the book doesn’t start there or finish there. It begins, in fact, by discussing military education and the kind of libraries provided for the teaching of future officers (often heavy on the classics)…

Here’s a link to the full text.

–Finally, several sources have posted discussion of a recent auction that involved a bit of indirect Waviana, Here’s an excerpt from the BBC’s report:

A large collection of rare teddy bears, including one that starred in the 1980s TV drama Brideshead Revisited, has fetched more than ÂŁ290,000 at auction. Aloysius, which was made in 1910 and featured in the ITV series, had been part of the collection at the Teddy Bears of Witney shop prior to going under the hammer. Ian Pout, the shop’s owner, previously told the BBC he had decided to sell much of his collection because of his age.  Aloysius … sold at the auction for ÂŁ26,000.

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