John Julius Norwich (1929-2018)

Posted on June 2, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

John Julius Norwich died earlier this week at his home in London at the age of 88. He was the only child of Evelyn Waugh’s close friend and correspondent, Diana Cooper, and her husband Duff, with whom Waugh was not on particularly friendly terms. The obituary in The Times mentions Waugh’s character based on John Julius’s mother who appears in several of his books:

Born in 1929 with some difficulty (the “Julius” of his name denoted a caesarean delivery), he was cherished in childhood and much was expected of him — as the child of the woman who inspired Evelyn Waugh’s “Mrs Stitch” it could not have been otherwise. Lord Beaverbrook and the Aga Khan were among his godparents. It was given to few schoolboys, even in Eton Cadet Corps uniform, to assist their ambassadress mother in inspecting the General de Lattre de Tassigny’s troops.

In his novel Scoop, Waugh describes in its opening scene a visit by John (not William) Boot to Julia Stitch in which

Josephine, the eight-year old Stitch prodigy, sat at the foot of the bed construing her day’s passage of Virgil…Josephine rose from her lesson to kick John as he entered. ‘Boot,’ she said savagely, ‘Boot,’ catching him first on one knee cap and then the other. It was a joke of long standing.

Boot and Josephine later engage in a conversation where the child describes everything (including Boot’s latest book) as “banal” only to explain that it was “a new word whose correct use I have only lately learned.” John Julius claimed somewhere that he was the model for Josephine. He would have been about Josephine’s age when the book was written.

In his edition of Diana’s letters to him entitled Darling Monster, John Juluis described Waugh’s relationship with his parents:

[Waugh] had been a regular visitor at Bognor before the war and now the war was over he came back into our lives.  He had always been a little bit in love with my mother: she had always been a little afraid of him…What she feared was his manner, his prickliness and not least his intelligence, for which she felt herself to be no match.  Another complication was provided by my father, who went through periods of disliking Waugh intensely—the feeling being entirely mutual—though they made it up in the end.

In describing John Julius’s career, the Times makes clear that his parents, who had lived extravagantly, left nothing behind, and he had to earn his own living, even though he was usually assumed to be independently wealthy. After retiring from his first job with the diplomatic corps, he lived mostly by writing. His greatest success was with popular histories such as the multi-volume works on the Normans in Italy, Byzantium and Venice. His last work was in this same genre–a single volume history of France: From Gaul to DeGaulle.

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Roundup: Brideshead Über Alles

Posted on June 1, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Perhaps in connection with what was effectively the BBC’s 10th anniversary rebroadcast of the 2008 film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited earlier this week, there have been several discussions of the novel and the film on the internet:

–An Australian Roman Catholic podcast site has posted a reading of the novel. It is not clear from their site whether this will be excerpts or the whole thing. The first posting was less than half an hour so they will have to get wheels on if they plan to finish it before the end of the Southern Hemisphere winter which is about to set in. Part one is available on Catholics Read (Cradio).

–An unidentified blogger on a religious weblog called The Rad Trad, reports on a discussion with some friends recently in which they expressed their views of Brideshead Revisited. Differences of opinion arose, with the blogger taking this position:

Lady Marchmain is probably the most detestable character in the novel, more so than her eldest son, Bridey, because his aloofness and good nature are almost foibles; he has no ill intentions while his mother seems like she could sneak a dagger through a vertebra and twist it just right. Why does Lady Marchmain hold such a tight grip over her family and why does it make Bridey and Cordelia good Catholics while Julia and Sebastian apostosize, return after her death, and become saintly on their own? Why does she smother Sebastian to the point of alcoholism when all he has done is rabble-rouse a little as a student?

The blogger goes on to explain, but not necessarily defend Lady Marchmain’s position based on her family and religious history. Some fairly vigorous comments have been filed on the weblog.

–Another blogger posting on steemit as “wojtyla” (which was the surname of Pope John Paul II) offers a socio-historical interpretation to compare with the religious approach on the other weblog. In this version, it’s all because of nostalgia for the class system. This begins:

The novel Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, originally published in the bleak reality of 1945 has been adapted for the screen twice, as a TV series in 1981 and a film in 2008. The two ecranisations, with a quarter of a century between them may differ in quality, yet both can be interpreted as the manifestation of a grudging nostalgia. English aristocracy of the early XXth century is portrayed as decadent and superficially dignified, yet the luxurious interiors of 1920’s Oxford and Brideshead manor reveal the true meaning of the film. The protagonist, a young middle class painter is shown to struggle with and ultimately fail to adapt to aristocratic society…

–Literary critic Joseph Pearce has posted an essay in which he considers whether there is a new Roman Catholic literary revival in the offing. He traces the projectory of the previous Catholic literary movement, stretching from John Henry Newman’s mid-19th c. conversion to the death of Graham Greene in 1991. Greene, Evelyn Waugh and G K Chesterton were the most successful exemplars of that movement. But he fears that the latest Catholic writers (many of whom he mentions) may lack the resources of the earlier flowering:

Today, amidst the rise of an increasingly intolerant secular fundamentalism, it is not easy for Catholics to find acceptance in the wider culture. It’s possible, for instance, were Brideshead Revisited to be written today, that it would have been rejected by mainstream publishers purely because of its pro-Catholic stance.

What he might have mentioned is the consolidaton of publishing firms into 4 or 5 mega-publishers where previously there were dozens of established (or as he puts it, “mainstream”) firms such as Chapman & Hall, Duckworths and Little, Brown which published Waugh and Heinemann which published both Greene and Anthony Powell. This lack of diversity cannot be helpful to writers seeking to appeal to a more limited audience.

–Nicholas Hoare has posted a 4 1/2 minute video from a Vermont PBS program in which he promotes new readers for Waugh’s books. He singles out Brideshead as well as Jane Mulvagh’s book from a few year’s back entitled Madresfield as examples of where new readers might want to start.

–Finally the novel has been recommended on two books blogs. Posting on Odessey Sarah D’Sousa of Pennsylvania State University recommends Brideshead Revisited as one of 60 classics for a summer reading list. These are described “old books that never get old.” And novelist Helene Dunbar is interviewed on the website The Debutante Ball by Kaitlyn Sage Patterson. Dunbar’s latest novel is entitled Boomerang and is about a lost boy. Here’s part of the interview:

Who is one of your favorite (fictional or non-fictional) characters?

My favorite book of all time is Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. And my favorite character in that book is Sebastian Flyte. I learned a lot from how Waugh wrote Sebastian’s character, never giving the reader (or the main character, Charles) quite enough of him. I kept this in mind a lot when I was writing the character of Trip in Boomerang. Although he and Sebastian are very, very different, I wanted them to share that same elusive quality. So I tried not to get into Trip’s head too deeply, and also gave him a little less page time than I really wanted to.

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Alan Bell (1942-2018)

Posted on June 1, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Yesterday’s Daily Telegraph announces the death of Alan Scott Bell. He was former librarian (1993-2002) 0f the London Library where he oversaw major building projects and computerization. According to an earlier notice on the London Library’s website, his death occurred on 24 April 2018. As explained in that notice:

Alongside his highly successful library career, Alan actively pursued wider literary and antiquarian interests. He was a regular reviewer in the TLS and other London journals and his work for publication included a biography of Sydney Smith (1980), editing The Letters of Henry Cockburn and contributing to Histories of Oxford University and the Oxford University Press. He was appointed a Visiting Fellow at All Soul’s College, Oxford in 1980 and from 1993 worked as an advisory editor on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Following his retirement he continued his literary projects including providing editorial assistance with the Oxford edition of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh.

He is listed with Alexander Waugh as co-editor of of CWEW v. 30, Personal Writings 1903-1921: Precocious Waughs which was published last year. Prior to joining the Library, Alan had enjoyed:

a distinguished career in collection development that began on graduation from Selwyn College, Cambridge with his appointment as Assistant Registrar to the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, and included fifteen years as Assistant Keeper at the National Library of Scotland (1966–81) and twelve years as Librarian at the University of Oxford Rhodes House Library (1981–93).

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A Tale of Two Venues: Chagford and Beckley

Posted on May 30, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Two of Waugh’s favorite writing venues have recently been in the news. An article on the Easton Court Hotel in Chagford, South Devon, was recently posted on the website jot101.com. This begins with a description of  the facilities in wartime from a 1942 publication called Let’s Halt Awhile by Ashley Courtenay:

‘ It is a tranquil spot…personal, intimate, and so comfortable, that I would rather call it the Inn of Tranquility, for Mr Norman B. Webb and Mrs Postlethwaite Cobb have compressed into this small Tudor house all those niceties which go to make eating, sleeping, and country living pleasurable pursuits. Authors find inspiration here. Books have been written at Easton Court. Read in particular Alec Waugh’s Thirteen Such Years, which describes the hotel and the surrounding country.

In a house so genuinely old, and so remote, it might be expected that one lead a Spartan existence. Not a bit of it. There is hot and cold running water, central heating, bedside reading lamps, and luxury mattresses in every room. At Easton Court, too, they understand the art of cooking, and make full use of their vegetable and fruit garden…and dairy produce around the corner….

Waugh wrote parts of several books there starting in the early 1930s, but it is most notable for housing him during the first half of 1944 when he composed virtually all of Brideshead Revisited on the premises while on leave from the Army. The unsigned post goes on to provide these details of the 1944 visit:

‘There are plenty of eggs ‘ he reported back to Laura Waugh, ‘ (and) I have found an old man who will go to Stinkers to get me claret’. By February 1sthe had written 2,387 words of Brideshead in only 1 ½ days and hoped to complete 2,000 words a day. A week later he had written a total of 10,000 words and pronounced the quality of his work ‘very good’. By the end of the month Waugh had been summoned back to London to resume his military duties, but had returned to Easton Court by April 3rd. Progress on the novel had dipped slightly by this time, but on June 16thBrideshead Revisitedwas finished. Waugh left Devon and by early July found himself stationed in Algiers.

I don’t think he was exactly “stationed” in Algiers but stopped there on the way to his post in Yugoslavia to visit Diana and Duff Cooper, where Duff was located as Ambassador to the Free French. There were reports a few years ago that the Easton Court Hotel was to be broken up into private houses (see previous posts), but according to this website, it seems still to be operating as a country bed and breakfast.

Before moving to Chagford as his writing venue, Waugh worked in a village pub called the Abingdon Arms in Beckley near Oxford. It was there that he wrote much of his earliest work, notably Rossetti and Vile Bodies. That venue was recently threatened with conversion when the brewery owners put it up for sale. But it was bought by a consortium of villagers and their friends who are keeping it in existence as a village pub. According to a recent story in the Oxford Mail, it has become a thriving business and

…has been named the best community pub in the country. The Abingdon Arms in Beckley appears in the 2018 Sawdays pub guide and has been chosen from the almost 800 pubs featured for the special award – one of only six handed out.

As reported in an earlier post, the new owners plan to erect a plaque commemorating Waugh’s association with the premises.

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Naomi Milthorpe on Waugh

Posted on May 29, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Naomi Milthorpe, author of Evelyn Waugh’s Satire (now available as an ebook as well as hardback), will appear later this week at the University of Tasmania’s Humanities Showcase. Her topics will be archives, literary objects and Evelyn Waugh. Also on the program will be a talk on intermodernism and Nancy Mitford by Eliza Murphy. The talks will be presented on Friday, 1 June in Room 346 Humanities Building, Sandy Bay Campus, 3:30-5:00.

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Updates: Brideshead Tonite

Posted on May 28, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Daily Telegraph offers this rather downbeat description in its TV schedules of the 2008 Brideshead Revisited film adaptation:

In the light of the 1981 TV version of Evelyn Waugh’s novel, you do have to admire the chutzpah of anyone else giving Brideshead a go. Julian Jarrold’s attempt suffers from a desire to force modern conventions upon a story defined by the mores of upper-class interwar Britain. Hayley Atwell and Ben Whishaw are the Flyte siblings, but Catholicism, the tale’s engine, is only pernicious, never seductive.

As metioned in an earlier post, the film will run on BBC2 at 11:25 pm tonight. It will follow a new production of King Lear featuring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson (who also plays Teresa Flyte in Brideshead). The 2008 film keeps on finding hard acts to follow. It will be available on BBCiPlayer for streaming from tomorrow.

The first two episodes of A Very English Scandal managed to combine docudrama and comedy in about the right measure. Ben Wishaw who plays Sebastian in the 2008 Brideshead does better in his role of Norman Scott (Jeremy Thorpe’s former lover) in this series. This is the story of the downfall of Thorpe, who rose to be leader of Liberal Party. As noted previously, Auberon Waugh played a part in the story, making his own contribution to its comic side. The Oldie earlier this month posted an excerpt from Auberon’s autobiography summarizing his participation in the affair. Alexander Waugh has also written an essay on this subject entitled “Rinka’s Revenge” in the current issue of The Oldie. Maybe Auberon will get a mention in the final episode next Sunday on BBC1. A better title for the series, from Auberon’s perspective at least, might have been “The Dog It Was That Died.” The first two episodes are now available for internet streaming on BBCiPlayer.

The Madrid newspaper El Pais interviews Spanish entertainer Javier Garruchaga about his band’s new album ¡Noticia Bomba! (title taken from Spanish translation of Scoop) mentioned in an earlier posting. The El Pais story also includes a video of the interview for those who understand Spanish. There are no subtitles but the interview is transcribed in Spanish in the paper.

UPDATE (30 May 2018): References to The Oldie added.

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Five Books (more)

Posted on May 27, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Reader Dave Lull has done some additional research in the archives of the Five Books interviews and came up with a July 2012 interview with Waugh biographer Selina Hastings. See previous post. She was asked about books relating to Waugh and the Bright Young People. Here is her list of the top five, but one should really read her interview in its entirety:

  1. Children of the Sun by Martin Green
  2. Fragment of  Friendship by Dudley Carew: (This is a wonderful book. Carew’s portrait of Waugh is so marvellous because you not only see the brilliant young man but also the rather vulnerable school boy…)
  3. My Brother Evelyn and Other Profiles by Alec Waugh: (In a way I feel sorry for Alec Waugh. In his lifetime he always felt that he was the brother who succeeded. During the twenties and thirties, Alec was far better known than Evelyn. He wrote a book a year, and was very pleased with himself, adored by his parents…)
  4. The Picturesque Prison by Jeffrey Heath
  5. The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, ed. by Charlotte Mosley

These probably failed to make it into the Evelyn Waugh Archive because none has Evelyn Waugh listed as its author. Another book outside the “archive” found by Dave is Waugh’s Diaries which was included by Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash in his April 2011 list of five books about the History of the Present:

…It’s a document of its time. It’s full of hugely politically incorrect and, by the end, almost self-parodic episodes but it’s also brilliant at catching the moment that life is turned into art.

That one should have been in the Waugh Archive but may have been missed because it is listed as “ed. by Michael Davie.” Thanks again to Dave for his follow up research.

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Philip Roth (1933-2018)

Posted on May 26, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The death was announced earlier this week of the American novelist Philip Roth. Like Tom Wolfe, who died the preceding week, much of his early work was written in the comic, satirical tradition of Evelyn Waugh. So far, however, no obituarist has made much of this connection (or, for that matter, even discussed whether there can be said to be one). I can attest to being hugely entertained by the comic elements in Roth’s early works. In these, such as Goodbye, Columbus, he satirized the community and people he knew best, the Jews living in Newark, NJ. He followed the same trajectory as John Updike who also began by writing  satirically about his Protestant family and their community in Shillington, PA. In recognition of their similarities, Updike later did Roth the honor of parodizing his life and works in the Bech stories.

Roth, like Waugh, also experienced marital problems which, according to an article in the Daily Maverick (a Johannesburg, South African online newspaper), Roth reflected in his writing:

Roth was also known for his written-about feuds with a former wife, Claire Bloom (her memoirs versus his use of a character in his writing who was a lightly disguised version of her),… In his eight and a half decades, before he “retired” from writing some five years earlier at a widely attended public event, Roth completed dozens of novels, as well as short stories, novellas, essays and other bits of critical commentary and writing. While many readers have their favourites from the Rothian ouvre, four books have stood out for me as special peaks from among his vast output – Goodbye Columbus, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Plot Against America and The Human Stain.

His first wife also comes in for her share of attention in the early novels. One of these. Letting Go (1962), could be added to the recommended reading list. It was his second book and first full-length novel . It may now seem dated but, for all that, is an excellent follow up to Goodbye, Columbus as well as a humorous and insightful commentary on the 1950s merging into student life in the early 1960s from one who was directly experiencing those times.

The Daily Maverick also places Roth in another tradition shared with Waugh: the great  writer who fails to score a Nobel Prize. The article (by J Brooks Spector) notes that:

Roth’s failure to be recognised earlier for his vast body of extraordinary work poking hard at the human condition becomes even clearer as Roth has joined the company, just for starters, of such deceased writers as Leo Tolstoy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and George Orwell – not to mention fellow American John Updike.

It seems unlikely that Waugh ever felt much disappointment at being passed over for a Nobel Prize. Indeed, he was probably more disappointed at failing to receive a knighthood than a Nobel.

Mark Lawson, who has an article on the occasion of Roth’s death in the New Statesman and who had once interviewed Roth, thought that his best writing came towards the end of his life, rather than that reflected in the earlier comic works:

The comic tone of the previous books was increasingly shadowed by tragedy, and reached the destination entirely in a trilogy published during the second Clinton administration. Zuckerman remains as a narrator or catalyst, but the main stories are those of others: “Swede” Levov, a businessman, in American Pastoral (1997); a radio star, Ira Ringold, in I Married A Communist (1998); and a college professor, Coleman Silk, in The Human Stain (2000), the last of which is, for my dollar, Roth’s best novel.

Perhaps Lawson has got it right, and clearly the success and celebrity of Portnoy’s Complaint rather embarassed Roth and caused him to change directions. Waugh experienced much the same phenomenon after the success of Brideshead Revisited. Although its notoriety was different in kind and intensity from that attending Roth’s novel, Brideshead nevertheless became popular for the wrong reason from Waugh’s perspective. Waugh’s last fictional works in Sword of Honour and Pinfold clearly showed he was moving in a new direction and, had he lived as long as Roth, might well have produced his best work toward the end. Indeed, there are those who consider these late novels to be Waugh’s best work. And it should also be remembered that even in his darker works, Waugh’s humor also makes its appearance.

UPDATE (27 May 2018): A few comments were added or edited.

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Roundup: Picture This

Posted on May 25, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

A remarkable photo of Evelyn Waugh has been posted on the men’s clothing website Voxsartoria. This is from 1950, although the name of the photographer is not given. What is most noticeable about the photo is the lighting on the fabric of the tweed suit Waugh is wearing. This is appropriate for the photo’s inclusion in a collection dedicated to promoting the return of tweed suits. There are also several photos of other writers, most prominently T S Eliot and the late Tom Wolfe, wearing suits of that fabric.

Another website (alamy.com) has posted a series of “stock photos” of Evelyn Waugh’s youngest son, Septimus Waugh. He is a woodcarver and sculptor and is depicted at his home and studio in Tiverton, Devon. There are also three photos of modern stained glass windows from County Durham and Yorkshire in the same grouping but there is nothing in the captions to connect Mr Waugh with those windows (although it is quite possible he may have contributed something).

In yesterday’s issue of the newspaper The New European, there is a story describing a photo by Mark Harrison of Conservative Party politician Jacob Rees-Mogg. The article by Bonnie Greer describes Rees-Mogg in the Harrison photo as “presenting the politician as we think we know him.” She goes on to explain that he appears in the photo to look like “a minor character from those two works by Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies and Brideshead Revisited.” That’s not terribly helpful given the large number of characters to choose from. The photo Greer is discussing is this one that was posted several weeks ago on another site. (See update below confirming the identity of the photo.) A better Waugh comparison might be found in another novel: this would be the “questing vole” from Scoop since Rees-Mogg could be fairly described as looking a bit “feather-footed” in this photo (check his hands) and certainly looks as if he might have just arrived in the studio from a “plashy fen” (explaining the need for the makeup). Greer’s story (“A Study in Vanity”) is reposted on PressReader.

One of our readers has sent a link to a literary website called Five Books which contains several references to Waugh’s works. This site invites other writers or experts to propose the best five books they have read in their respective fields of knowledge. The database created may then be mined for specific writers, and this is what reader Dave Lull has done, producing an archive of Waugh references from this website. It is perhaps not surprising that the greatest number of interviewees (7) included Scoop on their lists. Their topics were not all related to journalism, however, but included comic writing (Andy Borowitz) and books that inspired them (William Boyd). Humorist P J O’Rourke included Put Out More Flags on his list of books about political satire. Waugh’s collected Letters was among the 5 best literary letter selections, Decline and Fall, the best of schoolmasters, Sword of Honour, the best of WWII and Robbery Under Law, the best of Mexico. As a sample of the explanatory material available on the database, here’s the entry for Robbery Under Law by Hugh Thomson:

This is a good one. There was a big fashion in the 1930s for making the most of the trip by writing both a novel and a travel book about Mexico, as Greene and Lawrence did, but Waugh only wrote a travel book. It is little known and should be more widely read. It may be little known because of its awful title. The book has an odd genesis – it was a commission from the Pearson family who had oil holdings in Mexico that had been expropriated by the revolutionary government. They were so outraged that they paid Waugh to write a book about how arbitrary and unjust this was.

So, it’s an odd, sponsored book and while Waugh fulfils the brief, he also ranges far and wide across Mexico. He sees that its history is not as simple as ‘noble Indians and brutal Europeans’ and thinks Mexicans should celebrate their post-Columbian inheritance as much as their Aztec history. There is a fair amount of ‘dog eat dog’ in the Mexico Waugh describes – it was a tough place to live and work, and Waugh shows this with no sentimentality.

These interviews are dated from 2012 or earlier except for the one on Schoolmasters which is from March 2018. Oddly missing are lists including Waugh’s best selling novels Brideshead Revisited and The Loved One. Perhaps topics into which they would fit have not yet been assigned: Dysfunctional Roman Catholic Families, Weird Burial Customs, Film Adaptations?

Back to the subject of film, BBC2 will rebroadcast the 2008 film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited next Monday, 28 May. The BBC was one of the film’s backers, as was Harvey Weinstein (Miramax), who was recently arrested in the USA and charged with sexual criminal offenses. He was reported last year as having harassed one of the cast members of the 2008 film adaptation on a visit to the film location in Yorkshire. This was Hayley Atwell who played Julia and was told by Weinstein to lose weight. Another cast member, Emma Thompson, who played Teresa Flyte, told him to back off, which he reportedly did. See previous posts. This film will air at 23:25 and will be available on BBC iPlayer to stream on the internet thereafter. A UK internet connection will be required.

Thanks once again to Dave Lull for sending the Evelyn Waugh archive from Five Books.

UPDATE (27 May 2018): Information about dates of Five Books interviews was added. In addition, The New European story now appears on the paper’s website, and this will confirm that its reference is, indeed, to the photo of Jacob Rees-Mogg linked above in our posting. That photo now appears at the top of the story.

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Terence Greenidge and Degenerate Oxford?

Posted on May 23, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Peter Harrington Booksellers in London are listing a copy of the 1930 book by Terence Greenidge entitled Degenerate Oxford? A Critical Study of Modern University Life. He is also credited with several later books in his Wikipedia entry, including fiction, poetry and drama. He was a year ahead of Evelyn Waugh at Hertford College, but they were fairly close friends. They collaborated on the film The Scarlet Woman in 1924 which Greenidge produced and directed from a script written by Waugh and in which Waugh played two parts. Waugh is also listed as having appeared in two other Greenidge films made about this same time; these are entitled 666 and Mummers.

Waugh reviewed Greenidge’s book about Oxford in the Fortnightly Review (March 1930) and declared it a “treatise” as distinguished from the novels many of his friends were writing at the time. In the review, Waugh describes Greenidge as a prominent member of the University during his student days “in athletic, intellectual and social circles.” He goes on to note some of Greenidge’s more eccentric characteristics: “…he usually carried about with him a large tobacco tin, his razor and his tooth-brush, several books and an assortment of whatever of his own and his friends’ possessions excited his momentary interest.”

The review describes the book as “a thorough and unsophisticated examination of the nature and value of Oxford education.” Waugh comments specifically on the sections dealing with Athletes (“sound and witty”), Aesthetes (“good up to a point”) and the university authorities  (“will probably excite most discussion”). He takes issue with Greenidge on one question: “I could do with more plain speaking about homo-sexuality. By his implied assumption that homo-sexual relations among undergraduates are merely romantic and sentimental he seems to avoid the most important questions at issue.” Waugh’s review is collected in Essays, Articles and Reviews 1922-1934 (CWEW v26), p. 208. Waugh also wrote about Greenidge at some length in his autobiography A Little Learning.

The Peter Harrington copy of Greenidge’s book is described as “good” and has what looks like a largely intact dustwrapper. Less expensive copies are also available from Amazon traders.

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