Roundup: Waugh Widely Cited in London Papers

Posted on February 8, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

—-A novel by Duff Cooper (husband of Waugh’s friend Diana Mitford) was briefly noted in a recent issue of Evening Standard. This novel has been reissued in the Penguin Classics series. The notice is by Melanie McDonagh. Here’s an excerpt:

Operation Mincemeat is one of the better known operations of the Second World War, thanks to the film of the same name which was turned into an improbable musical. It caught the imagination because it was so very macabre: the body of a British officer would be found washed up near the coast of Spain bearing details of an intended action in Greece and Sardinia — to distract attention from the real operation, the liberation of Sicily…

This was the scenario for Operation Heartbreak, the only novel of Duff Cooper, best known as the husband of the beautiful Lady Diana Cooper, to whom he was consistently unfaithful, a persecutor of PG Wodehouse and Tory politician. …The story is briskly told but with the unconscious insight and detail that you get from inhabiting the time and place in which the novel is situated. It doesn’t match Evelyn Waugh’s work of the period — you don’t feel that we lost a great novelist in Cooper — but it’s poignant and moving, all the more for being adjacent to reality.

Waugh and Duff Cooper kept their distance from each other but that didn’t keep Cooper from admiring Waugh’s writing style sufficiently to try to copy it.

–The Daily (or perhaps Sunday) Telegraph has a story about foreign relations between the UK and Canada. These remind the author (David Blair) of a Waugh novel:

…It seems incredible now, but British Foreign Secretaries used to mount “campaigns” on subjects like media freedom, religious liberty, wildlife conservation and sexual violence, as if countering Russian aggression and Chinese ambitions for global power were not enough to fill their time.

They would call conferences on these issues and drum up attendance by striking preposterous deals with their counterparts: if you come to my event, I’ll attend yours. Listening to these phone calls, I would silently recite the words of Julia Stitch in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop: “Why would I go to Viola Chasm’s Distressed Area party; did she come to my Model Madhouse?”…

…That novel comes up again in a Guardian profile of author Nussaibah Younis:

The book that made me want to be a writer

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh is a brilliantly funny satire of war journalism that still rings disturbingly true. It inspired me to write a comedy about a bonkers UN programme in Iraq – which turned into my debut novel, Fundamentally.

The same writer also mentions the novel in a recent article in The Times (2 February 2026) where she is asked to name her favorite book by a dead writer:

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. In this brilliant satire of war journalism, the nature columnist William Boot is accidentally sent to cover “a very promising little war” in the fictional east African state of Ishmaelia. I read it after spending the best part of ten years wandering around the Middle East trying and failing to “build peace” and I related hard to Waugh’s hapless and naive protagonist as he encounters an industry more cynical and mercurial than he could have imagined.

Waugh perfectly depicts the absurdities of westerners utterly out of their depth in foreign war zones and, despite being published in 1938, it still rings disturbingly true to this day. Even the cringeworthy racism of the book is not a million miles off from the way British aid workers and journalists still talk about the foreign countries they exploit for a living, and end up resenting. For anyone interested in satire, war journalism or the long tradition of Brits being idiots abroad, it’s a foundational read.

—The Times also has an article by Ed Potton about film-maker Emerald Fennell and her latest production, Wuthering Heights:

…she turned up the outrageousness further in Saltburn (2023), a twisted mash-up of Brideshead Revisited and The Talented Mr Ripley with extra smut in which Barry Keoghan’s lower-class interloper Oliver Quick became obsessed with his fellow Oxford undergrad, the blithe toff Felix (Jacob Elordi). Oliver danced naked through a mansion to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Murder on the Dancefloor, drank Felix’s semen-laced bathwater and humped his love object’s burial mound, while Evelyn Waugh spun in his grave. That last scene, Fennell has said, was “sort of inspired” by Wuthering Heights, in which Heathcliff digs up Cathy’s grave, twice.

She was an “incredible” director on Saltburn, [actor in that film Richard E.] Grant says. “Her jolly-hockey-sticks voice beguiles you into thinking that you’re in for a St Trinian’s escapade, but her dark sensibility skewers that with her unflinching examination of class and sexual obsession. After winning an Oscar, mothering two children under the age of five, leading a crew of 150 and a large cast, she wore her authority very lightly.”…

Waugh’s novel comes up again in a later discussion of Fennell’s education:

…She read English at Greyfriars, the Catholic friary that was at the time a private hall of the University of Oxford, indulging a “Brideshead fetish” by striding about in Thirties-style men’s trousers and braces. Affected play-acting like that fed directly into Saltburn, she has said. “So much of everything I make is me trying to come to terms with what an embarrassing person I am.”…

–Finally, The Times had another story that featured Waugh’s novel. This is in an article by Jack Blackburn on a current exhibit at London Archives. The topic of the exhibit is “History of London’s Outlaws”).

Modern policing had different concerns from highwaymen and the like. The exhibition runs into the 1920s, with the story of Kate Meyrick, the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh’s Ma Mayfied in Brideshead Revisited, who ran numerous illicit nightclubs and was sent to prison for breaking licensing laws.

Was this a censorious incident in a post-war age where there was an appetite for fun? Or the dawning of a more sensible age of regulation?

A handsome photo (probably from the exhibit) accompanies the article. Here’s a link.

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Allan Massie (16 October 1938 – 3 February 2026) R.I.P.

Posted on February 4, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

Novelist and journalist Allan Massie has died earlier this week. Among his obituaries, several mention a connection of his early fictional works with those of Evelyn Waugh. His son Alexander Massie writes:

…His novels … ranged widely. He began with comedies of manners – very much in the school of Evelyn Waugh – but his chief interests were political and historical. He believed writing was a form of carpentry: style could be important but function trumped form. He disliked mannered or overly-perfumed prose and his own style was clipped and epigrammatic. “I am a dandy who can no longer be bothered to dress” was the arresting – to my mind – first line of “The Death of Men”, his roman a clef about the kidnapping of Aldo Moro.

The Times elaborates the point somewhat:

…The first of his 20 novels, Change and Decay in All Around I See, an Evelyn Waugh-style comedy, appeared in 1978, closely followed by The Last Peacock, a comedy of manners. But it was his third, The Death of Men, based on the kidnapping and murder of the Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro, that won him critical attention, with Encounter magazine describing him as “perhaps the finest living Scottish author”. The book won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award.

Finally, the Daily Telegraph indirectly elaborates this connection:

…In 1976 he began to review fiction …. After several false starts he completed and published his first novel, Change and Decay in All Around I See (1978), which he later described as “a somewhat scrappy comedy of low life in London”. He was pleased at the time with a party scene that lasted for several pages with all the dialogue left unattributed, but later came to regard such feats of ingenuity as rather pointless.

All three of the obituaries cited and linked above are worth reading. You will also find numerous references to Waugh and his work by searching “Allan Massie” in EWS News.

 

 

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Two Interesting Waugh Articles

Posted on February 2, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

On the same day late last week, two interesting and provocative articles were posted, both of which revolve around Waugh and his fictional characters. The first is entitled “Waugh Warned Us”. It was written by Paul Bauman and appeared in the religious/political magazine Commonweal. Here’s an excerpt from the opening paragraphs:

…In trying to make sense of [Donald] Trump’s preposterous and perilous ascendency, I have at last come to the realization that it bears an uncanny resemblance to the career of Rex Mottram, the ambitious businessman, playboy, and opportunistic British politician in Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. Mottram’s political cynicism, like Trump’s, recalls Henry Adams’s famous description of democratic politics as “the systematic organization of hatreds.”

The article then continues with what appears to be a fairly exhaustive and lively comparison of how closely Waugh’s character from the 1930-40s comes to resemble today’s American politician. The closing is quoted in full below:

…When the revelation of Mottram’s earlier marriage and divorce prevents his Catholic marriage to Julia, he sounds exactly like Trump in thinking that every problem has a financial solution. “All right then, I’ll get an annulment,” he declares. “What does it cost? Who do I get it from?”

“You know Father Mowbray hit on the truth about Rex at once, that it took me a year of marriage to see,” Julia tells Ryder.

“He simply wasn’t all there. He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.“

And now his doppelganger sits in the White House, counting his gold, gilding his walls, and subjecting the rest of us to his stunted vision of the world.

Like all great novelists, Waugh saw clearly an aspect of the future hidden from most of his contemporaries. Eighty years ago, in a moment of great triumph for liberal democracy, he understood the dangers of casting aside the past and every traditional moral sentiment in pursuit of fame and fortune. He warned about a future where every difficult question will be answered with a snort: “Quiet, Piggy!” He warned us not to give the Rex Mottrams of the world our attention, or our votes.

The complete article is available here and is well worth reading.

The other article is somewhat shorter but equally interesting. It is written by Dwight Longenecker and appears in yet another religious/political journal, The Imaginative Conservative. It compares another character from Brideshead Revisited to a character in a roughly contemporary American novel. The article is entitled “Nick Carraway and Charles Ryder: Characters of Delusion and Decadence”.  Here are the introduction and opening paragraphs:

One comes away from both F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” with an acute sense of the emptiness of the jazz age and the despair at the heart of all our delusions and decadence. One also can’t help but compare the lives of the authors themselves.

On re-reading The Great Gatsby (thanks to Ignatius Press’ newly published critical edition) and meeting again F. Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway, I couldn’t help being reminded of that other observer of delusion and decadence: Evelyn Waugh’s Charles Ryder.

Carraway—a simple bond salesman from the midwest is drawn into the glittering world of the seemingly sophisticated socialite Jay Gatsby. Charles Ryder—a modest Oxford student is drawn into the opulent champagne and strawberries world of Lord Sebastian Flyte. Both stories unfold in a sumptuous setting: Gatsby’s fantastic mansion in West Egg and Brideshead Castle—the ancestral pile of the Marquess of Marchmain. Carraway observes the decadence of 1920s American “new money,” while Ryder is drawn into the decay of 1920s English “old money”. Whether the money is old or new, and the characters archaic or parvenu, the delusion and decadence compare…

There follows a brief, well-written comparison of the two characters and a discussion of their historical significance. The article concludes with this:

…Waugh manages his moral neatly with a poetic “twitch of the thread”. Where Fitzgerald fails Waugh succeeds by placing a beacon of hope at the end of his tale: the darkened chapel heavy with incense and the flame of the sanctuary lamp re-lit before the beaten copper doors of the tabernacle.

As with the earlier article, this one is available on the internet and well worth reading in full.

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End of January Roundup

Posted on January 29, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

–A Scottish blogger, posting on Hole Ousia, has expressed his admiration for Waugh’s Diaries. Here’s his discussion of selections from the diaries which he has recently read:

I recently read ‘The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh‘ as edited by Michael Davie. What is shared below is a small selection of entries, often partial, which do not present the whole. I am interested in Evelyn Waugh for his writing [his art] and have read much of his work.

As a retired doctor I find that I also have some interest in the life he led which, it is fair to say, was anything but healthy: his excessive drinking and the powerful drugs prescribed for him cannot be ignored. I have no wish to  focus on this, particularly as my view is that the discipline of ‘pathography‘ has inherent difficulties.  Most important of these difficulties are that the subject is dead and the world that they lived in has passed.

Whilst it is tempting to ‘diagnose’ in retrospect, such a ‘pathological lens’ fails to see a much wider bigger, necessary, picture that it is impossible to capture.

The text of his discussion may be read on his website.

—The Times has an article by Oliver Berry who recommends 16 of the most romantic locations for short city-break visits in England which rival competing foreign sites. Number 10 is Oxford and here is his description of its possibilities:

Oxford is littered with literary love stories, from the doomed passion of Charles and Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited to the heart-rendingly sad conclusion of Lyra and Will’s story in His Dark Materials. Much of Evelyn Waugh’s novel is set in and around the grounds of Merton College, while the Botanical Gardens provide the location for the devastating denouement of The Amber Spyglass. Magdalen College’s Addison’s Walk, where many of the city’s most famous writers (including Tolkien, CS Lewis and TE Lawrence) wandered for inspiration, is a romantic spot for a stroll — and, for the best view, head to the spire of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin on the High Street. A former rectory surrounded by gardens, the Old Parsonage Hotel feels like quintessential Oxford — but inside it’s more Scandi-chic than olde England, with sleek rooms, an upmarket restaurant and Velorbis bikes to borrow.

The emphasis in Waugh’s novel was more Hertford College and Christ Church than Merton but since they are rather clustered together and within easy walking distance, these could also easily be included in a brief visit.

–An article in the Oxford paper Cherwell also mentions Waugh. This is by Tarana Varma and is entitled “Why you should talk to your scout more.” Here is an excerpt:

…The Oxford cohort of the 19th and early 20th century was almost entirely made up of men from the landed gentry and clergy; it was therefore necessary that the services provided by the University matched those that these young men had been accustomed to during their childhood. Cultural depictions of Oxford life before the 21st century, such as in Evelyn Waugh’s classic Oxford novel Brideshead Revisited, show these men in all their self-assurance, lording it over the menial labourers who are so clearly seen as belonging to a different world. Luckily, most of us have now moved away from such reprehensible treatment of those who work for our colleges, and from such discreditable attitudes towards class division. Do we then have nothing to learn from the past as regards the university’s workforce?

–Journalist Hannah Betts, who has previously expressed her admiration of Evelyn Waugh’s work, has recently chosen Handful of Dust as one of the 20 best books about love affairs. The selection appears in a story in this week’s Sunday Telegraph. Although her full article is not posted on the internet, her selection of Waugh’s novel is evident from the Telegraph’s promotional material which mentions the novel by title and refers to “Dull, obvious Tony Last…” Betts is also mentioned in previous posts as an admirer of Brideshead Revisited, which along with Handful features an affair as important theme.

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New Academic Study of Waugh Issued

Posted on January 24, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

Bloomsbury Publishing has announced the publication of a new academic study of Waugh. This is entitled Evelyn Waugh’s Exterior Modernism: Cinema, Satire, Comedy and is written by Waugh Society member and co-editor of Evelyn Waugh Studies, Yuexi Liu. Here are the publisher’s description and the Table of Contents:

“Drawing on literary manuscripts and the history of cinema, Evelyn Waugh’s Exterior Modernism examines systematically for the first time Waugh’s relationship with cinema in the context of modernism, a relationship crucial to the emergence and development of his strand of modernism.
The term ‘exterior modernism’ refers to the work of a group of younger writers, such as Evelyn Waugh, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Green, Christopher Isherwood, Anthony Powell, Elizabeth Bowen, and Patrick Hamilton, whose departure from high modernism took the form of an ‘outward turn’ privileging exteriority over the interiority of consciousness through foregrounding talk and drawing on cinema, comedy, and satire. Relating to other exterior modernists, Evelyn Waugh’s Exterior Modernism focuses on Waugh by way of exemplification, considering his oeuvre, non-fiction as well as fiction. To illuminate Waugh’s exteriority, Yuexi Liu develops an interdisciplinary framework, informed primarily by distributed cognition.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction Exterior Modernist: The Outward Turn

1. ‘In my beginning is my end’: ‘The Balance’ and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

2. Cinema, Comedy, and Satire: Decline and Fall as a Chaplinesque Silent Film

3. Talk Fiction and the Group Novel: Vile Bodies as the Group Novel

4. Waugh’s Heritage: Brideshead Revisited and Adaptation

Conclusion: ‘In my end is my beginning’

Bibliography

The book is available 5 February in the UK in both hardback and digital versions. It is already on offer from Amazon.com in the US.

 

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Roundup: MLK Day (US) Edition

Posted on January 19, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

–The Financial Times has an article by Janan Ganesh entitled “The right will want a United States of Europe”. It opens with this:

Auberon Waugh, son of the novelist Evelyn, died a quarter of a century ago this month. Never likely to match the old man sentence for sentence, he nonetheless plugged away at journalism. He had a respectable go at fiction too. And unlike his father, a straight-down-the-line conservative, he had at least one interesting opinion.  He was a rightwing pro-European.

Almost everywhere, attitudes to Brussels tend to harden the further right you go on the political spectrum. Waugh Jr bucked that rule, seeing Europe as a potential fortress against American cultural influence and other modern barbarities. He liked the European project because he was reactionary, not despite it. The closest modern equivalent is Jeremy Clarkson, that unlikeliest of Remainers…

Here is a link to the full story.

–The Imaginative Conservative also has story featuring Auberon. This is also on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his death. It is written by David Deaval and opens with this:

Great men shouldn’t have sons. This moral axiom is dubious, at best. It’s understandable why some say it. It’s even more understandable why sons of great men occasionally say it. Great men too often make terrible fathers. Even if apples don’t fall far from trees, they are too often bruised by the branches. Auberon Waugh, eldest son of the great novelist Evelyn, who died twenty-five years ago on January 16, 2001, took from his father both a great deal of suffering and a great deal of good.

Evelyn Waugh was both a serious Catholic convert and a famously cantankerous and slow-to-be-sanctified man. To the question of how a Christian could be such a nasty person, he responded that he would be scarcely human were it not for the faith. It is not to say he had no lovable, loving, or even holy qualities. It is to say that this great artist of the page often made messes of the pages of his life. As a father, Evelyn was distinctly troublesome. The son’s 1998 memoir, Will This Do?, began by observing that “the children of Evelyn Waugh did not come particularly well out of his published letters and diaries.”…

The entire article is available here.

—The Spectator has an article reminiscing about the days when transatlantic journeys were taken in relatively slow comfort and enjoyment on ocean liners rather than aeroplanes. Here’s an excerpt:

…And now? The ships have sailed into the sun­set, but traces of their world live on in art and archi­tec­ture. Where would inter­war fic­tion be without the ship­board love affair? Think of Evelyn Waugh’s Julia Flyte and Charles Ryder on their stormy ocean cross­ing, con­sum­mat­ing the pas­sion that had been impossible back at land­locked Brideshead. Or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers in Shall We Dance? (1937), tap­when dan­cing across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary to the melod­ies of Ger­sh­win (another reg­u­lar pas­sen­ger). But then, out at sea Any­thing Goes: Cole Porter’s fic­tional SS Amer­ican provides the whole set­ting for his 1934 musical…

The article is by Richard Bratby and can be read here.

–An article in The Conversation considers the importance of literary anniversaries and their observance. Here’s an excerpt:

…Literary anniversaries are not just limited to famous and well-loved authors, however significant. Many dates pass us by unmarked, despite the fact that we are in the midst of a golden era of key dates of literary significance.

The 2020s has been a decade of major Romantic-period milestones, including the bicentenaries of the deaths of the poets John Keats (2021), Percy Bysshe Shelley (2022), and Byron (2024). Last year’s Austen anniversary was particularly notable because the writer was so widely and enthusiastically celebrated.

Yet it also was the centenary year of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz-age classic The Great Gatsby, alongside Virginia Woolf’s modernist favourite Mrs Dalloway. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love all turned 80, while children’s classic The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis celebrated its 75th birthday….

The full article by Amy Wilcockson is available at this link.

—The Irish Aesthete (whose byline is “This is not an Oxymoron”) has posted a story about the country house known as Lisnavagh located in County Carlow. Here is an excerpt:

…In September 1937 Lisnavagh was inherited by William McClintock-Bunbury, fourth Baron Rathdonnell who, ten years later and in the aftermath of the Second World War, was faced with the challenge of how to look after a very substantial house on a relatively small income. Initially he and his wife, the artist Pamela Drew, put the place up for sale: one potential purchaser was Evelyn Waugh, then travelling through Ireland in the hope of finding a home for himself and his family: he described Lisnavagh as a ‘practical Early Victorian Collegiate building.’ …

Waugh’s visit took place after the war when he was seriously considering moving to Ireland. The quote is from a May 1947 Letter to John Betjeman in which Lisnavagh appears in Waugh’s short-list of three Irish country houses he was seriously considering after an extensive search (Letters, pp. 249-250). The article is well illustrated and can be viewed here.

–Finally. the Oxford student newspaper Cherwell has posted a brief 2012 story by Charlotte Hart that may be of interest. Here’s the opening:

We could not provide an adequate account of our university’s unusual literary past without mentioning the man who established the Oxford stereotype that remains ingrained in the minds of the public today. Undergraduates applying to Oxford probably envisage an indulgent existence of champagne luncheons, decadent excess and diamond-encrusted tortoises, but they could not be more mistaken (except perhaps for the unconventional choice of college pets).

Evelyn Waugh, it would seem, not only wrote about the decadence of upper class society, but lived it too. His thoughtful, satiric portrayals of the aristocratic way of life in novels such as Brideshead Revisited were partly fuelled by first hand experience. Arguably, it was his time at Oxford that shaped the literary satirist that we have come to know so well…

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Roundup: Writers on Waugh

Posted on January 14, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

–Two writers have posted a discussion of Waugh’s novel The Loved One. This is on YouTube and involves PhDs Kevin McAleer and Bruce Newsome, each of whom has written a book satirizing California. Here is a description of their talk:

It’s a short novel but rich, a masterfully concise, biting observational novel in which Waugh takes no friends, and uses opposing stereotypes to expose each other, and to expose both at the same time. Kevin and Bruce committed to discuss Waugh’s novel, having themselves each written a novel satirizing California. Bruce admits explicitly that his writing of “The Dark Side of Sunshine” was inspired in at least style by Waugh’s early novels, such as “Bright Young Things,” “Black Mischief,” and “Scoop.” As a reviewer, Bruce found that Kevin’s novel “The LA Kid” reminds of Waugh’s “The Loved One.” But Kevin hadn’t read it! So Kevin and Bruce committed to discuss “The Loved One” after a fresh reading. They didn’t expect to find this much to discuss in a short novel…

Here’s a link.

–Waugh’s biographer Selina Hastings has written an article in the latest issue of The Tatler about Cecil Beaton. This is entitled “Funny! Frenzied! Frivolous! Why the capers of Cecil Beaton and the Bright Young Things continue to captivate a century on”. Here’s the opening paragraph;

‘Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties’ – this was how Evelyn Waugh depicted the era of the 1920s, when the elite of the younger generation, determined to throw off the gloom of the Great War, dedicated themselves to entertainment. As Waugh portrayed them in his novel Vile Bodies, the Bright Young People (or Bright Young Things, as others called them) were funny, frenzied and frivolous, capering from party to party. Among them, and, like Waugh, an astute recorder of the period, was the photographer Cecil Beaton. Beaton had been at prep school with Waugh, who bullied him cruelly. Beaton later described Waugh as ‘a very sinister character’, while Waugh pilloried Beaton in Decline and Fall as the society photographer David Lennox, who ‘emerged with little shrieks from an Edwardian electric brougham and made straight for the nearest looking-glass’…

—The Critic magazine has an article entitled “Into the Boomersverse: Older commentators cannot understand how younger people experience the UK.” This is written by Associate Editor, Sebastian Milbanke, and opens with this:

I am regularly struck by the abiding truth of an observation made about English society by Evelyn Waugh over 70 years ago in Brideshead Revisited:

“They and I had fallen apart, as one could in England and only there, into separate worlds, little spinning planets of personal relationship; there is probably a perfect metaphor for the process to be found in physics, from the way in which, I dimly apprehend, particles of energy group and regroup themselves in separate magnetic systems, a metaphor ready to hand for the man who can speak of these things with assurance; not for me, who can only say that England abounded in these small companies of intimate friends, so that, as in this case of Julia and myself, we could live in the same street in London, see at times, a few miles distant, the same rural horizon, could have a liking one for the other, a mild curiosity about the other’s fortunes, a regret, even, that we should be separated, and the knowledge that either of us had only to pick up the telephone and speak by the other’s pillow, enjoy the intimacies of the levee, coming in, as it were, with the morning orange juice and the sun, yet be restrained from doing so by the centripetal force of our own worlds, and the cold, interstellar space between them…”

–Two internet booksellers have posted extensive lists of books by and about Waugh. Here are links, each of which contains a reproduction of the cover where available. These are posted by MostRecommendedBooks.com (total 47) and GoodReads.com (total 74 ).

–Finally, what appears to be a religious website called DeLibris.org provides a brief description of Waugh’s novel Helena. Here are the opening paragraphs:

A historical novel that narrates the life of Saint Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine, and her quest for truth and the Christian faith in a pagan world. Waugh recreates the Roman era in detail and explores the moral dilemmas of his characters. The novel shows how Helena, despite her position and power, faces personal and spiritual challenges that help her grow as a person and as a believer. The work combines historical facts with the author’s imagination, offering a rewarding reading experience.

Since little is known about Saint Helena’s life, the author —as he himself notes in the introduction— drew on his literary creativity to fill in the historical gaps and imagine unknown episodes. The result is an outstanding novel that combines historical accuracy with imagination, focusing mainly on the pivotal event of the discovery of the True Cross by the empress in Jerusalem…

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First-of-the-Year Roundup

Posted on January 7, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

—Prospect Magazine has posted an interview of novelist William Boyd by Cosmo Adair. It begins with a discussion of Boyd’s latest novels (several dealing with spies) and proceeds back from that. Here’s an excerpt:

…Of all the spy writers, Graham Greene is Boyd’s most obvious forebear: they share an enviable commercial success, an unfashionable devotion to plot, and a craftsman’s immunity to writer’s block (“I’m not one of those writers who sweats over the working day,” Boyd says.) But it’s Evelyn Waugh who presides over the moral framework of his novels. He paraphrases Waugh: “Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and he will ensure that nobody is going to be very happy for very long.”

–A Hertfordshire community network has posted an article about Evelyn Waugh whom it claims as one of the county’s native sons. The claim is based on Waugh’s early schooldays in the county. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Heath Mount School at Watton-at-Stone in Hertfordshire is one of the oldest prep schools in the country. Previously known as Hampstead Heath Academy, Heath Mount Academy and Heath Mount Grammar, the school was founded in 1796 in Heath Street, Hampstead, London, as a boarding school for the education of ‘boys and young gentlemen’. The school moved to its current home as part of the Woodhall Estate in January 1934.

One of Britain’s sharpest and most enigmatic writers, Arthur Evelyn St John Waugh, was a pupil here. Born on 28 October 1903 in West Hampstead, London, into a literary family, he attended Heath Mount as a preparatory step into the elite world he would later both critique and crave. Although records of his early school years are sparse, Waugh later recalled his time at Heath Mount with a mix of nostalgia and sharp humour, noting both its discipline and its rigid expectations. According to The Heath Mount Register 1865–1992, Waugh stayed there for seven years from 1910 to 1917. Whilst at Heath Mount, he was known for his bullying, most notably of fellow pupil Cecil Beaton, and his behaviour resulted in the foundation of the Anti-Waugh Society.

According to the text, when Waugh was a schoolboy at Heath Mount (1910-17) the school seems to have been located in North London; indeed, Waugh could probably walk from his home in North End to the school in Hampstead. The school moved to its Hertfordshire location only in 1934. Be that as it may, Waugh clearly qualifies as a Heath Mount old boy.

—The Spectator has an article about the Bright Young People of the twenties updated to today. Here are the some excerpts from The Spectator’s coverage:

A far cry from the ‘roaring twenties’ of the early 20th Century, the 2020s can be characterised as the ‘boring twenties’, argue Gus Carter and Rupert Hawksley in our new year edition of the Spectator…

The original Bright Young People cavorted across the country, holding scandalous parties. ‘Please wear a bathing suit and bring a bath towel and a bottle,’ read one invitation. The Metropolitan Police filled Bow Street’s cells with hundreds of nightclub revellers, mainly girls in fancy dress. Dancing, according to one clergyman, was a ‘very grave disease which is infecting the country’. This was the era of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, a novel of £1,000 wagers and orgies in 10 Downing Street. The old world was dying and the new one had yet to crawl out of bed…

[Today, by contrast] record numbers of young people are out of work but even those with jobs face such a dire cost-of-living situation that they have no money left over to spend on fun. Traditional cultural outings – like going to the theatre – are increasingly confined to older, richer generations. This is long-standing issue, but compounded by Labour’s economic policies. A slightly downbeat start to the new year here at the Spectator, but at least the episode provides a free dose of fun…

–The Los Angeles County Library has announced an event for later this month that may be of interest:

Join the LGBTQ+ Book Club for a hybrid (in-person and online) discussion of Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. For adults.

This is a hybrid event and will be hosted in-person in the West Hollywood Library Community Meeting Room as well as on Zoom. Please register at the link below to receive the link to the meeting via email.

https://library-lacounty-gov.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0pd-Goqz4uGNNbzVuW720zsRrGxTK1VeLG

West Hollywood Library’s LGBTQ+ Book Club meets on the last Tuesday of the month to discuss literary works of relevance and interest to the LGBTQ+ community.

Please contact the library to borrow a print copy of the book. eBook is available through Libby app/OverDrive.

The date is Tuesday, 27 January, 6-7 pm at the West Hollywood branch. Here’s a link.

 

 

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Happy New Year and Welcome to Public Domain

Posted on January 1, 2026 by Jeffrey Manley

Several papers have been carrying the story on books to be released today (1 January 2026) from copyright publishing restrictions and into the public domain. Among these, Waugh’s Vile Bodies has been prominently mentioned. It was published as his second novel in early 1930 in both the UK (C&H) and, a bit later, in the US (Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith).

Oddly, no one seems to be aware that another of Waugh’s books was published in 1930. This was Labels: A Mediterranean Journey, a nonfiction travel book that was issued later in the year by Duckworths. It was also published about the same time in the US by Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith but was retitled A Batchelor Abroad. This book would also seem to be entitled to publication free of copyright royalty restrictions. Two other books by Waugh had previously entered into the public domain: Rossetti (a biography) and Decline and Fall (a novel). These were published in 1928 in both the UK and US.

A perusal of Amazon listings in the US and UK indicates some level of activity on Vile Bodies. There is an ambitious listing for a collected edition of Waugh’s writing in a “Signature Classics Edition”. This would involve a 1052 page (apparently print) edition as well as a digital version ($0.99). The publisher is Asimis Books. In addition to Vile Bodies, the book will include the novel Decline and Fall, as well as a what looks to be a fairly complete collection of short stories. These latter would include several stories published after 1930, so there may be some royalties owing.

Other upcoming editions of Vile Bodies listed on Amazon.com include a Kindle ($3.99) and (apparently a paperback) book edition ($19.99) in the “Rediscovered Books” series published by the Ft Raphael Publishing Co. These versions are edited by Kevin Theis.  Another Kindle and possibly a paper edition is contemplated by the publisher BY2NEXT TEAM. The Kindle version would cost $0.99 but it is unclear what the cost of the print edition would be or whether Amazon.com will have it on offer. A print edition is apparently to be included since it is described as having “an excellent matte-finish cover that looks stunning on any bookshelf.” Additional forthcoming versions are noted by Rare Treasure Editions (January), Mint Editions (July) and Open Road Media (February). Whether any of these new editions will be offered in the UK is unclear.

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Christmas Greetings from EWS

Posted on December 25, 2025 by Jeffrey Manley

–Christmas was not a particularly happy time for the adult Evelyn Waugh, if only because his children were home from school. Here’s an example posted on a Substack.com website by Paul Fishman. This is taken from Waugh’s diaries (p. 668):

The year It’s a Wonderful Life was released [1946], Evelyn Waugh, characteristically, wasn’t feeling much Christmas spirit:

The frost has now broken and everything is now dripping and shabby and gusty. The prospect of Christmas appalls me and I look forward to the operating theatre as a happy release.

Waugh was going to have his haemorrhoids removed, thus the reference to the operating theatre. Christmas was as expected:

I made a fair show of geniality throughout the day though the spectre of a litter of shoddy toys and half-eaten sweets sickened me. Everything is so badly made nowadays that none of the children’s presents seemed to work. Luncheon was cold and poorly cooked. A ghastly day.

It wasn’t long after that that he and his wife departed on their first trip to the US in January 1947.

–Here’s an excerpt from a posting of recommended holiday reading by Dr. Robert Kaplan on medicalrepublic.com:

Waugh was the finest prose writer of his day. By 1957, age, health and drug use (chloral, bromides and amphetamines well diluted with alcohol) were catching up with him. To overcome the problems, Waugh took a sea trip to Ceylon, having obtained a fresh supply of bromide from his doctor.

The events that followed were described in his short novella, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, his most autobiographical work.

The Pinfold character develops a full-blown psychosis with paranoid delusions, hallucinations and thought insertion. Tormented to his limits, he leaves the ship after three days and, after going from Cairo to Ceylon, returns home.

His doctor confirms that he has a simple case of bromide poisoning, a diagnosis confirmed by a psychiatrist and physician. Waugh, dissatisfied with the material assessment, sees it instead as a spiritual challenge to his faith which he had overcome.

The evidence shows that Waugh did not change his ways, continuing to use bromide, chloral, paraldehyde, barbiturates and alcohol. This is a superb description of a drug-induced psychosis that even manages to include some funny parts, Waugh being Waugh.

–Finally, a book collector specializing in Penguin Books has posted a discussion of various ways to accumulate these charming volumes:

…I’ve been thinking about what I would do if I was starting now and one possibility is the Penguin Millions. These are a subset of the Penguin titles and importantly the first ‘million’ came out in 1946 so the scarce wartime crime titles can be avoided. But what is a Penguin Million and how many are there?

The first million has an explanation of the concept on the inside, in this case George Bernard Shaw had reached his ninetieth birthday in July 1946 and to mark the occasion Penguin simultaneously printed a hundred thousand copies of each of ten books. Nine of these were new to Penguin (books numbered 500 along with 560 to 567) and there was one reprint, Pygmalian (numbered 300 and originally printed in September 1941). Nowadays I doubt a million books by Shaw would sell very well but back then he was still a popular author and his works are regularly found in early Penguin lists and these titles were soon being reprinted again..

The idea obviously sold well enough for somebody at Penguin to decide that this was a good idea and the second million soon followed a couple of months later in September 1946 and this time the author featured was H.G. Wells.

After discussing other Penguin authors (including DH Lawrence) who enjoyed this demonstration of  their successful careers (at least with Penguin), the collector (posting as bookramblings.blog) comes to Evelyn Waugh:

Next comes Evelyn Waugh whose ‘million’ came out in May 1951. This time there are five titles new to Penguin (821 to 825) with five reprints Decline and Fall (January 1937), Vile Bodies (April 1938), Black Mischief (November 1938), Put out More Flags (October 1943) and Scoop (March 1944). There’s a nice potted bibliography along with the list of books in the listing. I’ve always quite liked Evelyn Waugh although he does seem to be a lot less well known nowadays. I also like the fact that his first wife, although only for one year as she had another relationship with John Heygate at the time, was also called Evelyn, just imagine the confusion when guests called…

After two more detective series, the program seems to have ended with Agatha Christie in 1953, except for a partial reinstatement for Arnold Bennett who had six Penguin books republished. The entire article can be accessed at this site.

Merry Christmas and best wishes for the New Year from the Evelyn Waugh Society.

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