Alexander Nazaryan in the New York Daily News gives the crown to Brideshead.
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Brideshead vs. Downton
Posted in Brideshead Revisited
Tagged Alexander Nazaryan, articles, Downton Abbey, New York Daily News
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Alexander Waugh US lecture tour in March
Alexander Waugh will give several public lectures on the subject of “Evelyn Waugh and the Question of Inheritance” during his visit to the United States this March. The lectures will be at the Evelyn Waugh Conference at Loyola Notre Dame Library in Baltimore on March 12th, Georgetown University Library in Washington D.C. on March 19th, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas on March 22nd. Information about additional appearances, if any, will be posted here when received.
In “Evelyn Waugh and the Question of Inheritance,” Alexander Waugh will discuss his career as an acclaimed biographer of his own family (Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family
Waugh enthusiasts will be intrigued to learn that, according to some advance publicity for the lectures, “[Alexander] will reveal hitherto undisclosed facts about the life and works of Evelyn Waugh, garnered over many years of searching for lost and hidden letters.”
Posted in Alexander Waugh, Events, Waugh Family
Tagged lectures
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Evelyn Waugh’s recipe for mulled claret
The following item was published in the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Winter 1972).
Waugh’s Mulled Claret
Francis O. Mattson
“It was shortly before midnight in early March; I had been entertaining the college intellectuals to mulled claret; the fire was roaring, the air of my room heavy with smoke and spice, and my mind weary with metaphysics.” So Charles Ryder describes the setting for his first meeting with Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited.
Ryder’s mulled claret was served to a party of five. In 1950 Waugh’s own recipe for “Mulled Claret (For Six Persons)” was printed in “As We Like It”; Cookery Recipes by Famous People, ed. Kenneth Downey (London: Arthur Barker), a collection of recipes solicited from 200 well-known people and published for the benefit of the Returned Prisoners of War Association. In accordance with post-war “regulations, restrictions, and rations,” contributors were asked to submit recipes that were “really simple and easy to follow” and to draw on ingredients currently available.
Apart from Waugh there were few creative writers among those replying: but there were contributions from Aldous Huxley (Gnocchi di patate), Christopher Fry (Melon sweet), and a characteristically dismissive “Opinion on recipes” from the vegetarian G. Bernard Shaw.
For those who might wish to try Waugh’s suggestion for a beverage “to be drunk during and after luncheon in February or after dinner on any winter evening,” we reprint the recipe here:
Take 6 bottles of red wine (it would be improper to use really fine Bordeaux, but the better the wine, the better the concoction). Any sound claret or burgundy will do. One cupful of water; 2 port glasses of brandy; 1 port glass of ginger wine; 1 orange stuffed with cloves; peel of 2 lemons; 3 sticks of cinnamon; 1 grated nutmeg.
Heat in covered cauldron. Do not allow to simmer. Serve hot and keep hot on the hob. Should be drunk at same temperature as tea.
Posted in Evelyn Waugh Studies, Miscellaneous
Tagged Francis O. Mattson, mulled claret, recipes
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Evelyn Waugh Conference & Exhibit in Baltimore
Loyola Notre Dame Library in Baltimore is hosting two events this year to commemorate Evelyn Waugh’s visits to the United States in the late 1940s.
- Evelyn Waugh Exhibit (February 27th to April 7th): “An Englishman in Catholic America,” a display of artifacts, documents, first editions, letters, and photographs (Ferguson Gallery, Main Level).
- Evelyn Waugh Conference (March 12th & 13th): Topics include Waugh’s U.S. travels, Waugh and U.S. writers, Waugh and film, Waugh’s Catholicism. Featured speaker will be Alexander Waugh, grandson of Evelyn Waugh, on Monday evening at 6 p.m. (Ridley Auditorium, Lower Level).
All are welcome, and registration is free. To register and to obtain more information about the events and local accommodations, email (click to email) or call (410) 617-6811.
Background reading: 2003 Notre Dame Magazine essay by Arthur Jones on Evelyn Waugh and his visits to Notre Dame and Loyola College.
Update (March 1st): Loyola has published on their university calendar detailed agendas for each day of the two-day conference, but strangely, the website is designed so that specific days on the calendar don’t have individual URLs and therefore linking to them is impossible. The most we can do is provide a link to Loyola’s events page. The conference takes place on March 12th and 13th.
Posted in Alexander Waugh, Art, Photography & Sculpture, Bibliophilia, Catholicism, Chattels & Movables, Events, First Editions, Letters
Tagged baltimore, loyola, notre dame
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A knighthood, on the other hand, may have gone down nicely
Evelyn Waugh appears in the recently released list of people who have declined honours (as he would have spelt it). He refused the offer of a CBE in 1959. Allan Massie's blog post in The Telegraph provides some details and has a link to the complete list.
Posted in Miscellaneous
Tagged 1959, Allan Massie, CBE, honors, honours, Telegraph
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Evelyn Waugh Forums now live
A threaded discussion capability has been added to this website. Commonly known as an Internet forum or message board, this feature permits people to hold conversations in the form of posted messages about a subject of common interest.
The Evelyn Waugh forums can be read by all users, but to start a new discussion topic or reply to an existing one it is necessary to register with the site. Only a username and email address are required; a password will be emailed to you.
Paul Johnson: Novelists at Arms
Paul Johnson in Standpoint magazine surveys novels and novelists of the Second World War, including James Jones, Norman Mailer, Olivia Manning, Anthony Powell, and Evelyn Waugh:
It is a mistake, in my view, to hold a popularity contest between A Dance to the Music of Time and Sword of Honour. They are wonderfully complementary. We are lucky to have both. Waugh did not cover so long a spectrum. But we should see Brideshead Revisited as his verdict on the pre-war period, which in Uncle Tony's account requires six novels. And Put Out More Flags is a knockabout farce, a comic curtain-raiser to the actual war beginning with Men at Arms, continuing with Officers and Gentlemen, and ending with Unconditional Surrender. All these titles are savagely ironic, the last signalling Waugh's despairing acceptance that there is nothing he, and any other honourable souls left, can do about the appalling state of the world which has emerged from what began as a just war.
Posted in Miscellaneous, Sword of Honour
Tagged Anthony Powell, James Jones, Norman Mailer, Olivia Manning, Second World War, Standpoint, WWII
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Evelyn Waugh His Book
An essay by Naomi Milthorpe in the most recent edition of Script & Print: Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia & New Zealand discusses the provenance and dating of Evelyn Waugh's bookplates.
Never seen a copy of Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine?
Unz.org provides free access to its online archive of periodicals, books, videos and films, including full runs of Horizon (1940-1949), Encounter (1953-1991), and many others.
LibraryThing completes online catalog of Evelyn Waugh’s library
The book-centered social website LibraryThing has announced that its project to make available online a catalog of Evelyn Waugh's library has been completed.
LibraryThing states that 2,752 books are in the finished catalog, but this number is considerably less than the 3,500 books said to exist in the Evelyn Waugh collection at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Comments are solicited from LibraryThing explaining how their EW cataloging team arrived at the number they did.
Update (Dec. 16): jburlinson, the person chiefly responsible for building the Evelyn Waugh library catalog, has responded to a question posed at LibraryThing about the book counts:
The 2,752 number represents the number of separate, individual titles. A number of Waugh's titles are multi-volume works, including "collected works" for many authors, such as Alexander Pope (9 volumes), Thomas Browne (6 volumes), Jonathan Swift (19 volumes), John Ruskin (11 volumes), many more.
Posted in Bibliophilia, Chattels & Movables
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