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.”

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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

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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.

 

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

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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

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BBC Marks 60th Anniversary of Waugh’s Death

Posted on February 14, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

The details are available at this link.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Producer: Lissa Evans

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in October 1990.

Information is available here.

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

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

* Charles Wilmot
* Jack Davies
* Stephen Black

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

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

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

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

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

Only about 40 of the original 100 programmes survive.

First broadcast on the BBC Home Service in November 1953.

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

 

 

 

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Latest Issue of EWS Is Posted

Posted on February 12, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

 

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Spectator Compares Waugh Novel to Current BBC Series

Posted on February 9, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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