–The national quality press has finally picked up the story of the upcoming auction of Piers Court. The Guardian has posted an article by Rupert Neate which explains how the sale came about:
–A feature length article in The Oxford Blue (a new independent newspaper) discusses a Waugh novel. This is “Literature of Love” by Alice Clara State. Here’s an excerpt:
…I want to talk with you about a few texts that deal with love in a way that is at once indissolubly beautiful and emphatically enduring â I am afraid I will only mention âclassicâ literature, however. […]
The âOxford novelâ beckons to us to begin our foraging, wandering trail of literary love. I hope it is a good place to start. (By the âOxford novelâ, I mean none other than Evelyn Waughâs â graduate of Hertford College and alum of The Isis magazine â seminal Brideshead Revisited.) The early portions of the book, its first soaring overtures, reveal and speak of a life that has been eclipsed even to us as Oxford students one hundred years (to the year!) since the two protagonists, Charles and Sebastian, matriculated. (Hang on â I am going to leaf through the novel now, as I write.) You can open this book to any single page, I should think, and happen upon something hauntingly gorgeous. It is a reservoir, at times still, at other times its tranquillity besmirched by a skittering pondskater, or the disturbance of an unfolding lilypad, and then, at the uncurling of a fist, the fingers flexing openward, the waterâs surface sliced into by a launched stone or pebble. Waugh takes his time with his words, he will not stand to be rushed. Arranged like mille-feuille, he plates morsels of dry truth, hungrily-whetted mouthfuls of discovery, and moments of human fragility as light and small as slumbering fairies: precious and injurableâtread carefullyâas a heap of crepe dresses and stitched rose-petals and transparent cobwebbed wings. The premise of the book is this â one uncertain boy of eighteen begins at Oxford, blithely unaware of himself and his own desires, and is suddenly waltzed into a great enactment of love and vision by the hands of Sebastian Flyte. Sebastian is a listless, yet mesmerizingly beautiful and unthinkably wealthy young gladiator amongst the pearly amphitheatre of love and boisterous youth. âI am not I: thou art not he or she / they are not they,â Waugh promises us readers in his authorâs note, we try to believe him without protest, but catch a hangnail on an inkling of disbeliefâyou do not need to trawl far in a biography of Waugh to unearth Bridesheadâs parallels with his own life. It is this recounted, replaited sadness and memory that helps form the spectral threads of this haunting tapestry of love…
Other authors considered include two poets–John Donne and Frank O’Hara–as well as Jane Austen.
—The Spectator has an article by Douglas Murray entitled “The new vandals: how museums turn on their own collections.” This describes “wokeist”actions exemplified by the Tate Gallery with respect to works by Rex Whistler and Stanley Spencer. The article opens with this:
This week I had the pleasure of going to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. I say âthe pleasureâ but visiting the Pitt Rivers was never precisely a pleasure. Twenty years ago, as an undergraduate, the collection was something of a rite of initiation. The place, filled with strange and wondrous objects, was famed above all for its gruesome pickled heads: artefacts reminiscent of the âcoconutâ that the one-eyed Brigadier Ritchie-Hook collects in Evelyn Waughâs Sword of Honour.
—The Australian has a story reprinted from the Wall Street Journal, an affiliated publication. This is entitled: “Taylor Lautner and Taylor Lautner? What Happens When Couples Have the Exact Same Name.” After describing the complications arising from this and other recent same-name unions, the story concludes with this:
Back in the 1920s, when the British author Evelyn Waugh married the socialite Evelyn Gardner, their friends differentiated between the two by calling them âHe-Evelynâ and âShe-Evelyn,â according to Martin Stannardâs two-volume biography of the author.
–Writing in The Oldie’s Blog, editor Harry Mount describes “the funniest, saddest and wisest things he read, saw and heard in 2022”. Among them is this:
–A Daily Mail gossip column comments on the recent announcement of the sale of Piers Court mentioned in a previous post. Here’s an excerpt:
…former BBC executive Jason Blain […] is selling his ÂŁ2.5 million Gloucestershire home.
But those who fancy the six-bedroom property once owned by Evelyn Waugh are going to have to trust their instincts â and pictures of it taken back in 2018 â as no one is allowed to view the house in person before they buy it. Not even agents Knight Frank have seen the property since Mr Blain, who worked in business development at the Beeb, bought it in 2019…
So far, the Mail seems to be the only paper commenting on the sale. The Mail earlier this year (11 January 2022) reported a story about Jason Blain in which they referred to an allegedly unpaid hotel bill which was the subject of a lawsuit and gave his residence as Perthshire. No mention was made in that earlier story of his ownership or occupancy of Piers Court. See link.
Ironically, the hotel involved in this earlier dispute was Waugh’s favorite London venue in the war and post war years. It was then called the Hyde Park Hotel and was managed by Waugh’s Army friend Basil Bennett. Here’s an an excerpt from the hotel’s history posted on its website:
The wicked delights Of Evelyn Waugh – The irascible Evelyn Waugh stayed and visited the hotel on a regular basis between 1942 and 1964 and enjoyed nothing more than playing pranks, such as mixing up the shoes left outside the bedroom doors or satirising fellow guests in his novels. He once sent Basil Bennett, owner of the hotel, a postcard âfrom Adolf Hitlerâ requesting a room, but signing it off, âI am a respectable Spanish gentlemanâ!
The 31st installment of the comedian Alexei Sayle’s podcast series that was entitled Outsider (An Evelyn Waugh Special) was posted earlier today on the internet. Here’s the link. The subject and participants were described in the written announcement on the website: “Evelyn Waugh experts Barbara Cooke and Paula Byrne join the podcast to talk all things Waugh. The life and writings of Alexei’s favourite author are explored and picked apart in this Evelyn Waugh special.” The interviewees are both well known in the Waugh studies community. They have both made presentations at Waugh Conferences and have written books and articles on the subject of Waugh’s life and works.
Their participation in the podcast was suggested to Sayle by Penguin Books. This was based, in turn, upon the two scholars’ recent introductions written for a new edition of Waugh’s books being published by Penguin. Byrne prepared the introduction for Brideshead Revisited and Cooke for Decline and Fall. More on this below.
Sayle began the podcast by proposing that they discuss Waugh’s life and work from the beginning. Cooke and Byrne then offered information about his childhood and Oxford years but they soon became sidetracked to his religious conversion. Sayle wanted to discuss what he deemed Waugh “sucking up” to aristocrats at Oxford and later but the Waugh scholars were having none of that. When Sayle noted that Waugh spent little time with coal miners, Byrne and Cooke pointed that he also had difficulties getting along with upper class friends and was, if anything, an equal opportunity snob.
Attempts were made to discuss individual books. For example, Sayle noted that Put Out More Flags raised an interesting subject of an incestuous relationship between Basil Seal and one of the characters but the subject soon broadened to encompass Waugh’s treatment of homosexual characters in several books.
Sayle also introduced the theme of the post-WWI choice between Communism and Catholicism that confronted writers of Waugh’s generation. But although Sayle is well known as an outspoken leftist, he was unable to steer the subject into politics as the scholars raked over other religious/philosophical interests of Waugh.
This lead Sayle into a discussion of Sword of Honour which he professes to be his favorite among Waugh’s novels. This topic took up much of the remainder of the 75 minute interview, as the three discussed several aspects of that work. As this drew to a close, a question was raised by another voice, probably that of the podcast’s producer, who was just beginning to read Waugh and was in the middle of the new Penguin edition of Decline and Fall. The interview closed with a discussion of Captain Grimes and Waugh’s attitude toward aesthetes at Oxford.
Sayle was disappointed that, even though the discussion was animated and wide ranging, there were several books they failed to cover such as Black Mischief, not to mention Scoop, Pinfold, Handful, Helena that were barely alluded to, as well as travel books, biographies, etc. Sayle hoped that this neglect could be the basis for the convening of another session in the near future.
The new Penguin editions that were the inspiration for Sayle’s podcast were published in October without much fanfare (in the US, at least, where they are not for sale). They are hardback editions in the Penguin Classics imprint. Brideshead is selling on Amazon.uk for ÂŁ16.99 and Decline and Fall for ÂŁ13.33. Other titles issued in this new format also have written introductions: Handful of Dust (Philip Eade), Scoop (Alexander Waugh), Sword of Honour (Martin Stannard) and Vile Bodies (Simon James). Penguin has posted the introductions to each of these novels on its website at this link. This will bring up the page for Decline and Fall and the introduction can be found under “LOOK INSIDE”. You will need to scroll down. If you return to the D&F page and go to the bottom, the other 5 novels will appear and their introductions can each be similarly linked .
UPDATE (3 December 2022): A link to Penguin Books’ website was added.
Real estate agents Knight, Frank have announced the sale by auction of Evelyn Waugh’s former home at Stinchcombe, Dursley, Gloucestershire. The sale will take place online on 15 December 2022. Details and contact information are available from the website of Knight, Frank and a link to the website of the auctioneers Allsop is copied below. Excerpts of the house description and sale procedures from Knight, Frank refer to an:
“8 bedroom house for sale in Piers Court, Stinchcombe, Dursley, Gloucestershire, GL11: 23.58 acres
Unless sold prior to or withdrawn Piers Court will be for sale by Auction on Thursday 15th December 2022–On the instruction of the joint fixed charged receiver.
The property has not been visited by the selling agents since 2019. All images dated 2018. It is NOT possible to view the property.
HISTORY
Perhaps best known for being the home of author Evelyn Waugh, Piers Court has many historical connections. It was used for royalists during the Civil War. In 1640 the local wealthy mill owning Pynffold family acquired Piers Court where they remained for 150 yrs. After the fall of Bristol, it is thought that Piers Court was ransacked by parliamentarian troops while searching for Prince Rupert, the Kingâs cousin. In the nineteenth century Piers Court saw little change until 1937 whenEvelyn Waugh was given the property by his parents in law. [Emphasis supplied.]
This Grade II* listed Georgian manor house is approached up a long drive. Piers Court is nestled in its extensive grounds enjoying views over its own land. Once described by Pevsner as a âdignified and elegant houseâ, Piers Court displays a classical 18th century façade with the central crowning pediment bearing a coat of arms which is supported upon enriched pilasters. Piers Court has not been inspected since early 2019 when purchased by the current owners. The property at the time was extremely well presented and benefits from both an imposing, formal layout ideal for entertaining, yet to the rear of the property lies a more homely arrangement of rooms ideal for family
living.
The front door opens into a classical Georgian hall with a flagstone floor and cantilever staircase. Off the main entrance hall was the formal drawing room and library, both of which provided the grandeur that would be expected of a Georgian manor house. On the west side of the library was a large bay window.The drawing room looked to the front of the house and down a copper beech avenue.The Elizabethan rear of the house, had slightly less formal rooms. The kitchen had a range of traditional wooden cabinets and a terra cotta tiled floor. The wine cellar comprised two rooms and wine bins.A self-contained staff wing lead from the kitchen.
The first floor offered the primary accommodation with an en-suite master bedroom with south westerly views of the parkland. There were four further bedrooms on this floor, all of which had en-suite.The second floor had three spacious double bedrooms which would be ideal for guests. Servicing these bedrooms was a family bathroom. It
is from this floor that a large attic space was accessed which provided
storage space.
Outbuildings
Positioned close to the house is the stunning William and Mary coach house
which is a Grade II listed building. In 2019 it provided 5 loose boxes and an
office/tack room on the ground floor and an upper floor with a loft and a
dovecote. The nearby mews, constructed in 1987 of stone elevations, had a
two bedroom apartment on the first floor with 5 five garages on the ground
floor. There were 6 loose boxes / garden stores with in the grounds.
Garden and Grounds
The front garden was lawned with a circular clipped yew. There was a croquet lawn and tennis court and many other garden components. The park was pasture with parkland trees including horse chestnut, lime, oak and copper beech. Lying to the south of the parkland were further grass paddocks. A footpath crosses part of the land to the west of the house.
VIEWINGS
It is NOT possible to view the property. The photographs [available on Knight, Frank website linked above] are from historic marketing in 2018. The vendors agents are able to discuss the property from historic viewings.
To access legal pack, go to www.Allsop.co.uk
Tenure: The property is occupied under a Common Law Tenancy at a rent of ÂŁ250 per annum. A Notice To Quit has been served on the occupant on 19 August 2022 and a copy of such notice was affixed to the property gate on 22 August 2022. A prospective purchaser should take their own legal advice regarding this.”
The auctioneers Allsop advise that pre-registration is required in order to bid. Their terms and and procedures as well as a detailed description of the property with photos may be visited and downloaded at this link.
Several newspapers and other media have run obituary notices for Derek Granger. The most comprehensive are those in the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. The Guardian, for example, mentions some of his other TV work for Granada:
When he took over as the second producer of Coronation Street, from 1961 to 1962, he learned an early lesson in overcoming unforeseen problems. A seven-month strike by Equity members meant that only 13 actors on long-term contracts could appear. Grangerâs ruse of using tall children to deliver milk and post failed to impress the union, so he put one of the characters, Dennis Tanner (played by Philip Lowrie), in charge of a theatrical agency and filled out scenes with snakes, sea lions, pigeons, dogs and a chimp.
He then switched to sitcom to create and produce The Bulldog Breed (1962), starring Donald Churchill as the disaster-prone Tom Bowler and Amanda Barrie as his girlfriend, Sandra Prentiss. He returned to comedy with the Coronation Street spin-off Pardon the Expression (1966), relocating Leonard Swindley (Arthur Lowe) to the branch of a national chain store as assistant manager. It was a massive hit, but Turn Out the Lights (1967), a spin-off of the spin-off, with Swindley as a ghost hunter, bombed.
Earlier, in 1964, Granger had a run as executive producer of World in Action. Among the episodes during his time in charge was Seven Up!, featuring seven-year-olds whom Michael Apted, the researcher, would subsequently visit as director of stand-alone programmes every seven years to chart the ups and downs of their lives. Granger also presented Granadaâs regional programme Cinema during 1964 and 1965.
The Daily Telegraph cites Derek’s 1952 interview of Waugh in Brighton:
In the early 1950s he interviewed Evelyn Waugh who was convalescing at a local hotel. Contrary to the received image of the famous novelist as rude, snobbish and overbearing, Granger found him âamazingly nice and wonderfully funnyâ. As they parted after a two hour talk, the writer murmured gravely: âOurs is a very exacting trade, Mr Granger, is it not?â
The Telegraph also mentions, in its closing paragraphs, an anecdote from the filming of Brideshead of which I was not previously aware:
A lifelong cat-lover, he tried to get felines in all his films. No fewer than 40 were scheduled for one scene in Brideshead, to lap up milk spilled in a road accident. On shooting day in Manchester, it rained and the cats declined to appear. Only one could be coaxed into the shot.
After retiring in the early 1990s, Granger, an engaging talker with an impish mien and relish for the absurd, returned to Brighton where he served as vice-president of the Regency Society and was involved in campaigns by various Brighton societies concerned with development threats to the cityâs historic centre.
The Argus (Brighton) also runs an obituary which includes several recent photos of Derek. Ironically, although it refers to Derek’s status as a former employee (his first job after leaving the military in WWII), it fails to note that his 1952 interview of Evelyn Waugh appeared in its sister paper the Sussex Daily News.
The producer of the 1981 Granada TV series of Brideshead Revisited Derek Granger has died at the age of 101. According to The Independent (Ireland) Derek was reported by close friends to have “died peacefully at his home.” The obituary appearing in the Hollywood Reporter is thus far the most definitive:
Derek Granger, the British producer and screenwriter who served as the driving force behind the acclaimed 1981 miniseries Brideshead Revisited, died Tuesday at his London home, screenwriter Tim Sullivan told The Hollywood Reporter. He was 101.
Granger teamed with Sullivan and Brideshead writer-director Charles Sturridge on the grand period films A Handful of Dust (1988), starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Judi Dench, James Wilby, Anjelica Huston and Rupert Graves, and Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991), featuring Graves, Helena Bonham Carter and Judy Davis.
A onetime journalist and frequent Laurence Olivier collaborator, Granger in 1958 joined Granada Television, where he was head of drama and produced the famed soap opera Coronation Street; the epic 1972-73 series Country Matters, starring Ian McKellen; a 1976 adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, starring Olivier, Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner; and, of course, Brideshead Revisited.
Based on Evelyn Waughâs sprawling pre-World War II novel first published in 1945, Brideshead Revisited was voted the 10th best British program of all time by the British Film Institute in 2000. Starring Jeremy Irons, Diana Quick and Anthony Andrews, the ITV production raked in seven BAFTAs and was nominated for 11 Emmys, including the one for outstanding limited series.
âIt was very highly experimental for the day because nothing like it of that scale had ever been done all on film except Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which was just a year before, but with nothing like the production values,â Granger recalled in 2017.
âThere we were with foreign locations ⊠hunting scenes, scenes on Atlantic liners ⊠very grand houses ⊠It was enormously spectacular. I donât think anybody had quite worked out how it should be done. And of course we were making it. I mean, we started off to do six hours and ended up making 11!â
Born on April 23, 1921, Granger served as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, then reviewed plays for the Sussex Daily News and Evening Argus in Brighton, England. Olivier liked his writing and recommended him for the job as the first drama and film critic for the Financial Times, where he helped launch the newspaperâs arts page.
However, Granger âwas bored stiff with reviewing,â he told The Telegraph last year, âand was aching to go into television. At just that moment, I got a phone call from Sidney Bernstein, the founder of Granada TV, asking me if Iâd like to join the company.
For 10 months in 1961-62, Granger was the second-ever producer on Coronation Street, where he introduced storylines that could span multiple episodes. He also produced its spinoffs Pardon the Expression and Turn Out the Lights as well as the documentary series Cinema and World in Action.
âWith great sadness the production team at Coronation Street and ITV Studios would like to send heartfelt condolences to Derekâs family and friends,â ITV said in a statement.
He left for stints at London Weekend Television and the National Theatre (as a literary consultant to Olivier) before returning to Granada to produce six plays, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Harold Pinterâs The Collection, starring Helen Mirren and Alan Bates.
Brideshead Revisited â which won just one Emmy, for Olivierâs supporting turn â cost several millions to make and, interrupted by an ITV strike in 1979, three years to complete.
Because of the work stoppage, Granger was forced to replace his original director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who had a previous commitment, with Sturridge, an inexperienced protĂ©gĂ© of his at Granada who was in his 20s. âHe turned out to be incredible,â he said.
Granger noted he and his team were driven to producing âsomething that is incredibly close to the feeling of the novel and would echo it. And I think ⊠the television experience is as good, if not slightly better. But thatâs what we wanted to do. We wanted to be true to the Waugh.â
He retired in the early 1990s. His husband and partner of 66 years, interior designer Kenneth Partridge â he worked on homes for John Lennon and Ringo Starr and Beatles manager Brian Epstein â died in December 2015 at age 89.
Derek was a good friend of the Evelyn Waugh Society. He appeared at the society’s 2011 conference at Downside. He had met Waugh personally in 1952 while a reporter for the the Sussex Daily News. A copy of the interview and Derek’s own memoir of how it came about along with his personal assessment of Waugh are reproduced in vol. 19 of the Complete Works 0f Evelyn Waugh (A Little Learning), pp. 517 ff.
–Iona McLaren writng in the Daily Telegraph considers the problem posed by readers who want to be warned against reading something that might upset them–in this case about books in which animals die. The article opens with this:
The US writer David Sedaris tells the story of his sister Lisa refusing to see a film because she had heard that a dog gets killed in the first 15 minutes. “I reminded her that the main character dies as well, horribly, of Aids, and she pulled into the parking lot, saying, ‘Well, I just hope it wasn’t a REAL dog.'” On behalf of Lisa – and, frankly, most English people – I am pleased that Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has been given a trigger warning by the University of Greenwich for depicting “animal death” when the mariner admits: “With my crossbow/I shot the albatross.” This is a poem in which many sailors die, some in quite imaginative scenarios, but it takes the betrayal of a seabird to get the eyes stinging. It’s because, as Lisa Sedaris says, “human suffering doesn’t faze us much”. We see ourselves parodied in Dame Mildred Porch and Miss Tin of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, trying to get 1930s Africa compliant with the RSPCA. As GK Chesterton once put it: “Wherever there is animal worship, there is human sacrifice.” […]
One somehow expected a suggestion of a trigger warning for Black Mischief that included references to avoidance of descriptions of racial prejudice and/or consumption of human flesh. However, after discussing several examples of trigger warnings that involve animals and other matters of readers’ potential concerns, the article concludes:
Of course, it’s good to feel something, sometimes, and the great thing about trigger warnings is they could help. Of Mice and Men, Bambi, and White Fang would all be there in the “WARNING: animal death” section of the library. And me? I’d be amusing myself in the “WARNING: child mortality” section for, as Oscar Wilde said of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”
–The Chelsea Arts Club has announced the presentation next week of a one-man play by actor Bob Kingdom entitled Bloody Brideshead: Both Sides of Evelyn Waugh. In this he explores “the complexities behind Evelyn Waugh.” The performance will take place on 4 December at the club, 143-5 Old Church Street, SW3. You must be a member of the club or guest of one to attend. See above link for details.
—The Times has an article in its “Feedback” column about what was once known as the “fourth leader” on its editorial page:
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned a light-hearted leading article from 1946 celebrating the return of bananas after the war. This prompted Mark Negin to write from Ramsgate. If his memory wasnât deceiving him, he says, âit was a regular exercise in the English class of my small prep school, evacuated to Wales, to write a precis of the fourth leader. It was always humorous and witty. When and why was the fourth leader dropped?â
Welsh prep school? This sounds like a scene from Evelyn Waughâs Decline and Fall. My colleague Rob Nash tells me that Times leaders were also deployed at his boarding school, where he had to copy one out if heâd been naughty. Itâs nice to know that theyâve had their uses.
Anyway, the banana fourth leader, as Mr Negin suspected, was a classic example of the Times institution kicked off by the paperâs proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, in a telegram to the editor from Paris, dated January 25, 1914: âHumbly beg for light leading article daily till I return â Chief.â
Northcliffe, who also owned the Daily Mail, was determined to get The Times into profit by broadening its readership, and introducing a bit of frivolity on the leader page seemed a good way to start. Whether it worked or not, the light leaders â they might have been the third or the fifth, but were always known as the fourth â continued to appear until 1967, when William Rees-Mogg became editor. Bent on raising the paperâs gravitas, just as Northcliffe had aimed to lighten it up, he axed the fourth leaders on his first day…
–The Spanish language publication La Diaria Cultura based in Uruguay has a brief article on Waugh’s career. After a review of his life and works, the article concludes:
With a long and prolific publishing life in Spanish during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, his work was published copiously by Losada, Alianza, EmecĂ©, Criterio and Sudamericana, with translations written by Guillermo Whitelow, Pedro Lecuona, Floreal MazĂa, Clara Diament and Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, among othersâ, Evelyn Waugh’s work deserves … all that attention, although for the average reader the mere mention of his name signifies a woman (there is a great joke about it in the film Lost in Translation, by Sofia Coppola), if not the comfortable and obtuse reductionism of placing him among the reactionary writers, âfrom the rightâ, that stoned seat to which authors such as Knut Hamsun, Curzio Malaparte, Ernst JĂŒnger, Louis-Ferdinad CĂ©line and many others, all apostrophized as conservatives and other epithets as useless as stupid. Of course, Evelyn Waugh himself would not be interested in the praise of his contemporaries or the worship of generations to come, since he knew that the fate of the world is nothing other than decadence. Not in vain in an interview for The Paris Review, from 1962, when asked what period of history he would have liked to live in, he replied: âThe 17th century. I think it was the time of the best drama and the best romance. I think he might have been happy in the 13th century, too.”
The translation by Google leaves something to be desired in this particular case. Here’s a link to the original.
–The Guardian has a review of the BBC’s drama series SAS Rogue Heroes. This is by WWII historian Anthony Beevor. The article opens with this:
 I really have to take my hat off to Steven Knight. The writer of Peaky Blinders has adapted Ben Macintyreâs SAS Rogue Heroes, the authorised history of the Special Air Service, and turned it into the best dramatic series the BBC has produced for ages.
After a discussion of the plot and characters, Beevor continues with this:
In the desert, there was little time for snobbery. Right from the start, we see the SAS coming together as an unholy alliance of upper-class thugs, mostly from Guards regiments, along with âpiratesâ from other backgrounds who are equally violent and determined to fight the advancing Axis forces. In what was almost inevitably a misogynistic environment, men were judged on their courage and stamina. Several of them…may even have been suppressing gay instincts as they fought and drank men from other units into oblivion back in the fleshpots of Cairoâs red-light district. It was Evelyn Waugh, an officer from the Middle East commando unit known as Layforce, who claimed from personal knowledge that most gay men in the armed forces did not conform to popular stereotype. âBuggers were jolly brave in the war,â he wrote later to Lady Diana Cooper.
Randolph Churchill makes an appearance in Episode 5. The series is also discussed in previous posts.
UPDATE (28 November): Randolph referenced re SAS Rogue Heroes and typo corrected.
Lincoln College, Oxford has announced an event for early next month. It is entitled “From Despair to Faith: Evelyn Waughâs A Handful of Dust and Edmund Campion“. Here are the details:
You are warmly invited to a discussion, with Clare Asquith, Gerard Kilroy, Alexander Waugh, and Henry Woudhuysen, to celebrate the publication of the OUP editions of Edmund Campion and A Handful of Dust as part of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh.
The event will take place in The Oakeshott Room on Thursday 8 December, from 5-7pm.
Booking is required but there is no fee. Here is a link to the booking form. Kilroy and Woudhuysen are the editors, respectively, of the Campion and Handful volumes of the CWEW series. Campion will be published next week in the UK and Handful in early December. North American publication of both books is scheduled for February.
–A recent book with a Waugh theme was listed (with reservations) among the Daily Telegraph year’s best biographies:
Daisy Dunnâs Not Far From Brideshead (W&N, ÂŁ20) is less satisfactory. What should be a dynamite intellectual history of how three great classicists â Gilbert Murray, Maurice Bowra and EâR Dodds â shaped our modern world gets mired in the sort of creamy nostalgia that Evelyn Waugh found so embarrassing when he came to revise Brideshead Revisited in 1959.
–Another recent Waugh-related book gets a boost from Matthew d’Ancona on his website TortoiseMedia.com. This is Hellfire: Evelyn Waugh and the Hypocrites Club. Here’s an excerpt:
…For Waugh, it was a portal into aristocratic society. Cockburn described it as âa noisy alcohol-soaked rat-warren by the river.â High seriousness was disdained by its members but, as Powell would later recall, its members were âa collection, most of them, of hard-headed and extremely ambitious young menâ, many of whom went on to occupy leading roles in national culture and the republic of letters. Like Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead, they used Oxford as a playground and salon for debauched self-indulgence, before embarking upon the harder business of adult life.
The club was finally closed down after a riotous party at which its members dressed as Queen Victoria, choristers in lipstick, Madame de Pompadour and, fatally, a nun â who was in fact Arden Hilliard, the son of Balliolâs bursar, spotted by the porters trying to slip into the college on the evening of 8 March 1924. This was sufficient grounds for a ban. But the bonds formed at the club would linger long into the century; 40 years after its closure, Waugh recalled it as the âstamping ground of half my Oxford life and the source of friendships still warm today.â
–A new documentary series on UK Channel 4 is mentioned in Church Times. This also has a Waugh element:
SOME readers of the Church Times will have felt ruefully familiar with the problems underlying Channel 4âs new series Castle Howard: Through the seasons (Sundays from 11 November). [sic] How to pay for essential repairs? Will numbers ever recover from Covid? And the never-ending challenge of responsibility for a beloved and inspiring chunk of our heritage…
The Yorkshire Post also has posted an article about the series. See this link. The first episode briefly mentioned Brideshead Revisited in connection with a recent exhibition involving the costumes for the Brideshead adaptations filmed there as well as those for the more recent Bridgerton series. The next weekly episode is scheduled for today, Saturday, 19 November at 810p. The first episode can be watched on the streaming site 4oD. A UK internet connection is required. The second will be available after tonight’s broadcast.
–Matthew Parris writing in The Times describes a recent TV award ceremony he attended. This was the Editors Media Freedom Awards and extended over several hours, through most of which he was bored:
…There was, however, a moment Iâll always treasure. The Daily Mirror were having a particularly good night but everyone was quiet to watch a harrowing clip from an award-winning documentary about Afghan women forced to sell their kidneys, the camera lingering on each awful scar as the poor women raised their clothing. After the clip came a secondâs shocked silence. It was broken by the loud pop of a champagne cork from the Mirror table. Only the cold-hearted kept straight faces. Oh, Evelyn Waugh (I thought) thou shouldst be living at this hour. It could have been a scene from Scoop.
–An OUP editor with a sense of humor has written an extract for an academic journal’s review of a book entitled “Private Bill Legislation in the Nineteenth-Century Parliamentary Promotion from 1797 to 1914”:
This book reminds one of the delightful exchange between Guy Crouchback and the immortal Apthorpe in Evelyn Waughâs Sword of Honour trilogy. When asked to give a lecture to the troops, Apthorpe volunteers to talk about the jurisdiction of Lyon King of Arms compared with that of Garter King of Arms. Crouchback queries whether the men will be interested, to which the reply is âNot all of them, perhaps. Those that are interested will be very much interested indeedâ.
Apart from the authorâs wife Lizzy to whom this book is dedicated, and who we can therefore assume has a consuming passion for minute details about private bill legislation in the 19th century, not many people will be interested in this book. But those who are will be very much interested indeed.
And many of those who are not would probably be all the better for it if they were.
This is a book of consummate scholarship.
–Duncan McLaren sent the following message on the recent occasion of Evelyn Waugh’s birthday:
I had just written a birthday tribute to Evelyn when I began to receive anonymous postcards from someone paying his own tribute. As a result, this piece has a certain gravitas and complexity, not necessarily obvious from the start
BBC Radio 4 Extra will broadcast a 3 hour radio adaptation of Put Out More Flags in early December. This will be aired on three successive days starting Monday, 5 December at 0500 and repeated at 1000 and 1500, with a different episode each day. Each episode will one hour. It will be accessible on BBC worldwide via the internet shortly after the first broadcast of each episode. Here’s the link: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001fwx1>.
The adaptation is by Denys Hawthorne and was first broadcast in September 1990. Basil Seal is played by the late Simon Cadell, best known for his appearance in the BBC sit com Hi-De-Hi!.
Here’s the BBC’s description:
As the Second World War looms, upper-class loafer Basil Seal considers his role in the unfolding events.
Evelyn Waughâs sixth novel, first published in 1942. The satire reprises characters found in previous novels such as âDecline and Fallâ and âVile Bodiesâ.
