Bellamy’s Boosted

Posted on April 18, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Two London papers have this week profiled Bellamy’s restaurant on Bruton Place in Mayfair:

Ben McCormack in the Daily Telegraph on Monday (15 April) begins by making a meal (if you will excuse the expression) of the two visits by the Queen since the restaurant opened in 2004. He then tries to make his way through her menu choices but deviates after caviar and smoked eel mousse, substituting steak and frites for his main. He was persuaded against selection of her choice of Dover sole for his main by the plain looking example served with oil and lemon to an nearby table. The restaurant offers what McCormack calls “approachable exclusivity” and is described by its owners as “a club without a sub”. In his conclusion, he explains that “Bellamy’s name is a homage to the gentleman’s club in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy but also a pun on ‘bel ami’ French for ‘handsome friend.’. McCormack describes the restaurant as inspired as much by Parisian brasseries as London members’ clubs.

Later in the week, Tanya Gold described her meal at Bellamy’s eaten for The Spectator, possibly on the same night McCormack made his visit (Gold was there on a wet Tuesday). She goes into a bit more detail about the Waugh connection:

Bellamy’s is named for the club in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. That was probably its first mistake if it wants a large clientele now: the pool of Waugh-lovers fascinated by the decline of the aristocracy — a trend that has stalled, if it ever existed, which should give them comfort — has shrunk through heart attack, death and, likely, exile. The survivors call Bellamy’s ‘a club without a sub[scription]’. That is probably its second mistake. The name is also a pun on Guy de Maupassant’s Bel Ami, a novel about journalism. It is not my kind of journalism, or novel. Novels about journalism are usually as awful as novels by journalists. It is obviously designed for an older generation of British aristocrats during their mythical decline.

After rather exhausting the topic of the Queen’s association with the restaurant in a detailed comparison between its decor and that of the only room of Balmoral Castle open to the public, Gold concludes:

It may be the ideal restaurant of the mythical Spectator reader. It is less expensive than Wilton’s and less gaudy than Rules. It is, as Franco-Belgian brasseries in London go, perfect. The food is superb. […]

Both reporters mention a three-course prix fixe menu available for £29.50. I checked the menu on the internet and, indeed, what looks like a bargain for central London is available at both lunch and dinner. Alas, it does not stretch to the Queen’s selections, but those are available on the regular a la carte menu at what also seem reasonable prices for this location.

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Winter Evelyn Waugh Studies

Posted on April 17, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Winter 2018 issue (No. 49.3) of Evelyn Waugh Studies has been published. The contents are described below. A copy is posted on the EW Society website:

ARTICLES

Jacqueline Condon, “The Mystery of Grace: Brideshead Revisited as a Chestertonian Detective Story”

Introduction: G. K. Chesterton, famous both as a Catholic apologist and a mystery writer, proposed that, “The Ideal Detective Story…need not be superficial. In theory, though not commonly in practice, it is possible to write a subtle and creative novel, of deep philosophy and delicate psychology, and yet cast it in the form of a sensational shocker” (“The Ideal Detective Story” 178). While Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece Brideshead Revisited is hardly a penny dreadful of cloak and dagger intrigue, this paper will contend that it nevertheless answers Chesterton’s challenge by drawing on the tropes of detective fiction and applying them to serious moral and theological purposes. In particular, Waugh is responding to Chesterton’s metaphor of the Catholic Church as a merciful “divine detective” hunting down sinners in order to save them. The novel’s exemplars of staunch Catholicism, Lady Marchmain and Bridey, attempt to take on the role of investigators in order to uphold the family’s Catholic identity. However, their efforts backfire and only drive their prodigal family members further away. They are not true detectives but only inept sidekicks. The true “divine detective,” grace itself, is nevertheless able to triumph in a moment of dramatic revelation worthy of a mystery novel, bringing about the conversions not only of Sebastian and Julia, but Lord Marchmain and Charles as well. 

REVIEWS 

Azania, Rhode Island

Narrative Paths: African Travel in Modern Fiction and Nonfiction, by Kai Mikkonen. Reviewed by Nicholas Vincenzo Barney 

NEWS

John H. Wilson Jr. Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest

Peter Howell, The Debagging in Decline and Fall

Links

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Evelyn Waugh and the Notre Dame Fire

Posted on April 16, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

References to Evelyn Waugh have appeared in two stories relating to the destructive fire at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Posted in the Spectator, an article by Douglas Murray opens with this:

Civilization only ever hangs by a thread. On Monday one of those threads seems to have frayed, perhaps snapped. It is impossible to watch the footage coming out of Paris, all that can be done is to groan and turn away. It is not possible to watch the spire of Notre-Dame collapse. It is not possible to watch the great cathedral consumed by fire.

Evelyn Waugh once said that in the event of a fire in his house, if he was able only to save his children or his library, he would save his library because books were irreplaceable. Only at a moment such as this is it possible to concede the slightest truth in that remark. Almost anything could be borne rather than the loss of this building.

The reference to Evelyn Waugh is largely correct in restating Waugh’s priorities but is taken a bit out of context and somewhat overstated.  In a diary entry for 13 November 1943, he refers to announcements that the Germans are setting up “rocket guns” in France that will carry “vast explosive charges into London.” These are no doubt the V-1 and V-2 rockets the first of which were launched in June 1944, shortly after the Normandy landings. In anticipation of these attacks, Waugh had ordered the books he had been keeping at the Hyde Park Hotel to be returned to his library at Piers Court for safekeeping. His entry continues:

At the same time I have advocated my son coming to London. It would seem from this that I prefer my books to my son. I can argue that firemen rescue children and destroy books, but the truth is that a child is easily replaced while a book destroyed is utterly lost; also a child is eternal; but most that I have a sense of absolute possession over my library and not over my nursery. (Diaries, p. 555)

The Catholic World Report has an article about the fire in its “Dispatch” section. After restating the profound sense of loss caused by the fire, the article also sees some signs of hope:

One can readily see in the fire a metaphor for the state of the Faith in Europe in this increasingly secular age. But after the Cross comes Resurrection—and yesterday provided signs of hope.

The first sign came in the immediate concern expressed for the Blessed Sacrament. That the tabernacle was emptied and Our Lord’s Real Presence in the Eucharist was saved from harm is a consolation. The priests and firefighters who facilitated this reminded the world that the whole purpose for the construction of Notre-Dame in the first place was to be a worthy dwelling place for God. I am reminded of Cordelia’s conversation with Charles in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. She tells him about the closing of the chapel at their family estate after the funeral of her mother and explains having to watch the priest empty the tabernacle, leaving its golden [sic] door ajar. “I suppose none of this makes sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic.” she said. “I stayed there till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn’t any chapel any more, just an oddly decorated room.”

The article by Fr SeĂĄn Connolly goes on to see other signs of hope in the rescue of the Crown of Thorns relic and the preservation of the cruciform stone walls of the structure. Having just read yesterday Ann Pasternak Slater’s essay on Brideshead in her insightful and entertaining book Evelyn Waugh: Writers and their Work, I was struck by one slight misstatement in the CWR article. Pasternak Slater makes a point, for various reasons, of the fact that the door of the tabernacle at Brideshead is bronze, not gold (1960, pp. 47-8). Indeed, she made this seemingly minor point so well, that I was immediately reminded of it when I read the CWR article.

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Roundup

Posted on April 14, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

–A recent post in the website Beforeitsnews.com announces that the Holy Stairs in Rome have recently been reopened after an extended period of restoration. The story cites Evelyn Waugh’s Helena for background:

The great Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh had a special devotion to St Helena, and in his fictionalized account of her life, gives a very funny explanation of how the Holy Stairs might have come to Rome in the first place. When St Helena arrives in Jerusalem, she is taken on a tour of the local governor’s palace, which he refers to, in the language of British Imperial administration, as “Government House.” (The book is filled with clever anachronisms of this sort.)

“Helena, alighting, seemed to regard the place critically. The major-domo … tried to put a good face on it by remarking that this was originally Pilate’s Praetorium. It might have been. No one was quite sure. On the whole most people thought that it was, though certainly much altered. Helena was plainly impressed. The major-domo went further. These marble steps, he explained, were the identical stairway which Our Lord had descended on his way to death. The effect was beyond his expectation. The aged empress knelt down, there and then in her travelling cloak, and painfully and prayerfully climbed the twenty-eight steps on her knees. … Next day she ordered her private cohort of sappers to take the whole staircase to pieces, number them, crate them and pack them on wagons. ‘I am sending it to Pope Sylvester,’ she said. ‘A thing like this ought to be in the Lateran. You clearly do not attach proper importance to it here.’

–Irish novelist Colm TĂłibĂ­n has written a journal describing his recent cancer treatment. This appears in the current issue of the London Review of Books. Toward the end, as he awaits release from the hospital after his latest treatment, he writes:

A rumour spread in the hospital that a doctor who knew about blood clots would visit me later in the day. Only he could decide whether I went home or not. He had the same name as a character in Wallace Stevens’s Notes towards a Supreme Fiction, who was also referred to as ‘major man’. By this time I was confronting the fact that I was slowly going mad, and that this wasn’t helped by the steroids and the lack of sleep and the general excitement about going home and seeing my boyfriend. In bed, I began to whisper ‘major man’ as Catholics in a similar state might call out the name of Jesus or his mother. I also prepared a joke to tell this doctor so that he might accept my urge to go home. Preparation was important, as I can’t really tell jokes. I just don’t know how. I can try to tell them, but they come out skewed and flat and somewhat sad.

When the doctor arrived, I worried, at first, that I had begun the joke too quickly. It was about Randolph Churchill having a tumour removed and the tumour turning out to be benign and Evelyn Waugh saying that they had removed the only part of Randolph that wasn’t malignant. The doctor laughed. He seemed like a good-humoured guy. He checked that I would be able to inject myself in the stomach every night with some blood-thinning agent. He told me not to take any long-haul flights for the moment. He suggested I see him before Christmas. And then he told me I could go home.

–Interviewed in the New Statesman, veteran conservative political commentator Roger Scruton alludes to another well-worn Waugh quotation:

Evelyn Waugh once lamented that the Conservative Party had “never put the clock back a single second”. Does Scruton agree? “I think that’s his romanticism, of course it’s true. But it’s not entirely true. What the word conservative means is not putting things back but conserving them. There are things that are threatened and you love them, so you want to keep them.”

–Literary journalist Lucy Freeman comments in her Gulf News column about the recent extension of the Brexit deadline. Noting that she generally opposes such postponements, she quotes Evelyn Waugh as an example of the importance of maintaining a schedule to work against:

On May 7, 1936, [sic] Evelyn Waugh, English writer of novels, biographies and travel books, and a prolific journalist, wrote in his diary: “Children have all returned to school. The weather is delicious, the house is silent, there is no reason for me not to work. I will try one day soon.” Eventually, he knuckles down. What quiet triumph there is in the line: “I did a little work.”

The correct date is May 7, 1956 (Diaries, p. 760).. In 1936 Waugh was unmarried and childless.

–Finally, in a publisher’s announcement of the reissue in paperback of Juan TazĂłn’s  The Life and Times of Thomas Stukeley, Waugh’s characterization of the subject in his Edmund Campion is quoted:

Described variously as picturesque, quixotic, cloudy minded, remarkable, and (by Evelyn Waugh) as a “preposterous and richly comic figure”, Stukeley remains a flamboyant and fascinating character in the imagination of succeeding generations.

Waugh goes on to explain that it was the discovery of Stukeley’s reckless offer to the King of Spain to seize Ireland for that country that required Campion to become a fugitive.

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Richard Ingrams Remembers Auberon Waugh

Posted on April 13, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Catholic Herald has published a remembrance of Auberon Waugh by Richard Ingrams. This is occasioned by the recent collection of Auberon’s articles in A Scibbler in Soho. Ingrams was editor of both Private Eye and The Oldie when Auberon was a contributor and also recalls his less well-remembered employment by the Catholic Herald. Here’s an excerpt:

The book contains many reminders of Waugh’s unique talents, including some welcome extracts from his long-running Private Eye Diary, in which he adopted the persona of a wealthy aristocrat consulted by politicians and in regular touch with members of the Royal Family. It was done so authoritatively that some readers believed him when, for example, he wrote that he had recently been enjoying tea and cucumber sandwiches with the Queen Mother and advising her about Edward Heath’s Conservative government. It may seem like a work of wild fantasy yet his Diary (reprinted in two books) gives a more convincing picture of the strange world of the 1970s than many a serious work of social history.

Apart from these extracts from Private Eye, I would have liked to see some of Waugh’s contributions to the Catholic Herald, to which he was recruited in 1963 to supply a column on current affairs for a weekly fee of eight guineas. It was to be the forerunner of many subsequent columns in a variety of magazines and newspapers and, looking back, Waugh considered that his CH contributions were “more reasonable and politely argued” than anything that came later. Nevertheless, they managed to provoke a storm of protest from readers, leaving Waugh with the constant fear of getting the sack, the eight guinea fee being his main source of income at the time.

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Academic Roundup: Vagabond-language and decadent arcadias

Posted on April 12, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The following articles appeared in academic journals during 2018 and were not previously mentioned in our postings. Abstracts or excerpts from introductory materials are provided as available:

–Helena M. Tomko, “A Good Laugh is Hard to Find: From destructive satire to sacramental humor in Evelyn Waugh’s Helena“, Christianity and Literature, v. 67, issue 2, pp. 312-31, 1 March 2018:

Abstract. Despite Evelyn Waugh’s conviction that Helena (1950) was his greatest work, the novel receives less critical attention than his well-known interwar satires and his postwar hit, Brideshead Revisited (1945). This article argues that the novel accomplishes Waugh’s self-conscious postwar effort to rehouse his satiric impulses in a mode that resists both the “dark” laughter of modernism and the sentimentality risked in mid-century Catholic fiction. With metafictive attention to genre and style, Helena exemplifies what this article terms “sacramental humor.” Waugh’s fictionalized St. Helena embodies the contrast between satire that seeks to correct or destroy and humor that seeks to heal.

The author is Asst Prof of Literature at Villanova University.

–Annabel Williams, “Vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts: locating home in Waugh’s travel writing”, Textual Practice, v. 32, issue 1, pp. 41-58, 2018:

Abstract. This essay establishes a framework for comparing Waugh’s interwar travelogues with his fiction, by aligning the tropes of home and travel. I will propose that, in his travel writing, and figuratively speaking, Waugh never left England. His impulses to travel, and so his representations of ‘abroad’, are involved in an entrenched desire to find or create a home. Through readings of Brideshead Revisited, Black Mischief and Remote People, I examine the aporia emerging from a disjunction between the falsely presented factual places and half-imagined fictive places that span genres in Waugh’s oeuvre. Heidegger’s theorisation of dwelling offers a productive means of analysing the divide between home and homelessness in Waugh. I will suggest that a certain aspect of Waugh’s writing – a ‘vagabond-language’ – destabilises the binaries of remoteness and the homely, the foreign and the native, with which his work is obsessed. Debbie Lisle’s investigation of geopolitical discourse will help an understanding of spatial representation in Waugh’s work and the textuality of his constructions of home. Though Waugh could neither leave home, nor solve the overwhelming question of deracination for his time, his work encourages us to engage in the remoteness of home, and perhaps to find home in the remote.

The author is a member of the English Faculty, Merton College, Oxford.

–J V Long, “Edmund Wilson Had No Idea: Brideshead Revisited as Catholic Tract”, Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature, v. 70, issue 1, pp. 43-58, Winter 2018

Abstract. Evidence in the text of Brideshead Revisited shows that it is inadequate simply to link Evelyn Waugh’s conversion to Roman Catholicism with his ostensibly reactionary sensibility. Rather than merely providing an exercise in apologetics, Waugh’s novel displays religious experience that is grounded in the author’s conversion and practice of his faith. The novel mines a deep understanding of both the complex experience of English Catholicism and the riches of the liturgical drama and texts that were experienced during the Holy Week Tenebrae services with which he was familiar.

The author is Associate Professor at Portland State University and Chairman of the Evelyn Waugh Society.

–Martin B Lockherd, “Decadent Arcadias, Wild(e) Conversions and Queer Celibacies in Brideshead Revisited“, MFS Modern Fiction Studies, v. 64, issue 2, pp. 249-63, Summer 2018:

Abstract. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is among the most important and influential Catholic novels in the English language. It is also one of the queerest novels of its time. This essay explores the diverse ways in which Waugh’s novel traverses the apparent divisions that separate Catholic and queer sexuality. Drawing on archival research and recent theoretical and theological insights regarding celibacy, it argues that Brideshead participates in the aesthetic of fin de siècle British Decadence as a means of driving its central characters toward a form of sexuality that is at once potentially orthodox and queer.

The author is Asst Prof of English at Schreiner Univerisity.

–D Marcel DeCoste, “Contested Confessions: The Sins of the Press and Evelyn Waugh’s False Penance in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold“, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, v 21, issue 3, pp 62-84, Summer 2018:

Excerpt. I contend […] that Waugh’s novel neither depicts Pinfold’s confession nor enacts Waugh’s own. Rather, it is, as its title proclaims, the story of an ordeal, an agonizing and agonistic “test of guilt or innocence,” from which Waugh’s stand-in emerges, we are told, “victor” (OGP, 231). What the book exposes, then, is not the penitent-author’s grievous faults, but an author’s contest with his critics, and what it seeks, by its victory, to establish, is the falseness of those critics’ stock formulation and reprobation of Waugh’s sins. [Footnote omitted.]

The author is Professor of English at the University of Regina and a member of the Evelyn Waugh Society.

–Finally, Modern Language Review, v. 113, issue 1, pp. 235-37 (2018) prints a review by Barbara Cooke of Naomi Milthorpe’s book Evelyn Waugh’s Satire: Texts and Subtexts. See previous post.

 

 

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Evelyn Waugh, d. 10 April 1966. R. I. P.

Posted on April 10, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Evelyn Waugh died on this day in 1966 at his home in Combe Florey, Somerset.

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Others in Abyssinia

Posted on April 10, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

Duncan McLaren has posted a new chapter (“In Search of Scoop”) on his website relating to Waugh’s second trip to Abyssinia in 1935. This is based on the book Waugh in Abyssinia but is supplemented by the writings of three other London-based correspondents who accompanied Waugh around the countryside and stayed in the same Addis guesthouse during their visits–Partrick Balfour (Evening Standard), Stuart Emeny (News Chronicle) and WF Deedes (Morning Star):

Deedes knew Stuart Emeny from working on stories with him in England. To some extent they teamed up, with Patrick Balfour and Waugh making another pair. Waugh found Deedes and Emeny’s remorseless hunt for non-existent stories faintly contemptible, but to an extent they all had to live together, so he passed it off as good-natured banter.

In another sense, it’s Deedes and Waugh that make a pair, in that they chose to write intimately about what they found in Abyssinia. The essays of both Emeny and Balfour found in Abyssinian Stop Press are much less personal, perhaps because of their remit. Balfour’s essay ‘Fiasco in Addis Ababa’ omits mention of Evelyn Waugh altogether, while Emeny’s mentions Waugh up-front but omits to mention him thereafter. About the ill-timed expedition they shared to to Harar and Jijiga, Balfour confines himself to a historical and geographical overview […] The real contribution of At War with Waugh, by W.F. Deedes, is the insight it gives into Waugh’s character and behaviour in Abyssinia in 1935. Deedes observes that Waugh provoked a feeling of resentment against his more professional colleagues. However, Waugh was looked up to as a senior figure because of his travel experience and his books.

Much of what McLaren writes will be new to those unfamiliar with the writings of these other correspondents. This is particularly true of the side trips Waugh describes to Harar/Jigiga and Dessye. Some will no doubt have read Deedes’ book which was published   in 2003, but the book to which the others contributed has been long out of print.

As usual McLaren provides photos as well as maps from these other books where they illustrate the subject in his text. In one case, he goes so far as to identify Waugh in a group photo in Addis Ababa where no mention of his presence is made in the source book. He also provides comparisons of passages from Waugh in Abyssinia with those in the other books about the same event. And as in the past, he imagines a few conversations among these four. It makes for enjoyable reading even for those familiar with the story.

McLaren explains that he prepared this chapter as part of his effort to swot up on the Abyssinian travels in advance of his discussion of Scoop with Martin Stannard at the Chipping Camden Literary Festival next month (Friday, 10 May 2019). Details here.

 

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Fleabag and Julia Flyte

Posted on April 9, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The final episode of Fleabag’s second TV series was broadcast yesterday on BBC. The series has occasioned more than the usual amount of comment in the press. See earlier post. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Serena Davies has high praise for the series, written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge who also played the lead role.  She credits the BBC with taking a decision to make a series that foregoes the usual noirish thriller with “no-strings sex” or its “opposite, the tightly-corseted period drama.” Instead they have delivered an “investigation into how faith and human attachment at their best are synonymous versions of love.”

Davies describes the story as a “clash of religion and romance” not seen since

“the adulterous heroine of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair gave up her lover because she believed God had preserved his life during the Blitz.[…] Or Evelyn Waugh made Julia Flyte choose God and self denial over Charles Ryder and ‘living in sin’ during their pitiful parting on the stairs at the end of Brideshead Revisited.”

As earlier reported in the Times, Waller-Bridge like Greene and Waugh is a Roman Catholic. But who in this story is Julia Flyte–Fleabag or the priest?

Davies seems to think that there can be no third series. I’m not so sure. We may have seen the last of the priest, but Fleabag’s ultimate gaze at the camera as she walks away from the bus stop did not suggest a final farewell.  If there is a sequel, however, Davies is probably correct in predicting that it won’t match the levels of comedy and tragedy in this one. All episodes of both series are available with a UK internet connection on BBC iPlayer. In the US, viewers will be able to watch series two beginning May 17 on Amazon Prime.

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The Oldie Does Auberon

Posted on April 7, 2019 by Jeffrey Manley

The Oldie has been running on its weblog a series of excerpts of Auberon Waugh’s Rage columns from its early issues. The latest posting from 1995 deals with aging and is one of the better ones to surface. He begins by explaining how French villagers deal much more humanely with treatment of the mentally handicapped (which he described a bit more colorfully as “village idiots”) and the senile than do the British, simply by leaving them alone:

The point about senility is that it is only distressing if people are prepared to be distressed by it. In the small villages of the Aude, in southern France, they simply weren’t prepared to treat it as anything except a fact of life, to be regretted, sworn at or joked about as the spirit moved them. In England, it seems to me that we treat senility as something between a disgrace and an infectious disease, possibly brought on by masturbation in youth. Not only are oldies who begin to show the symptoms whisked away into a home, even if it means ruining the family in the process; once they are in a home, they become a non-person, visited grudgingly and with increasing embarrassment on both sides.

He then segues into a consideration of how Harold Wilson dealt with his own aging by simply disappearing:

When distinguished oldies become senile, they are immediately withdrawn from view, not left babbling in the sun. Harold Wilson was scarcely seen in his last five years, while he was suffering from Alzheimer’s. It seems especially craven to lock a former Prime Minister away in this fashion when we have a national institution called the House of Lords, specially designed for them to exhibit themselves. This is one of the most humane political initiatives in the world.

The Oldie also posts the reprint of an article by Jeffrey Bernard about his favorite topic –drinking. He refers with some disdain to efforts being made to cure alcoholics and comments on their results as applied to him:

[…] the fact is that when I am not drinking I bore myself. I feel non-functional – a tea bag without hot water, bacon without an egg. But it has never been my intention to get drunk. That has always been the inevitable accident at the end of the day. Most drugs either have side effects or they don’t work efficiently. I used to start drinking at 11 am, pub opening time, and reach my peak of well being at lunch time. Unfortunately that peak only lasts for up to two hours and then the wheels fall off, the memory evaporates, repetitiveness sets in alongside aggression or melancholy or both.

Other side effects of withdrawal are also noted. One of the proponents of a cure

in a chart mapping the downhill progress of the alcoholic […] marks one station of the descent as ‘Starts drinking with social inferiors’. People like Auberon Waugh do that every time they walk into a pub. But in spite of the fact that drunks may number among the most boring people in the world, one does meet some extraordinarily interesting people during the downhill struggle.

The Oldie’s editor Harry Mount also offers comments on Auberon in a review of the collection of his writings in the newly published A Scribbler in Soho. This appears in the Catholic Herald:

Bron, who would have been 80 this November, wasn’t just extremely funny – a rare enough gift. He was also completely fearless. And he was a prose stylist as accomplished as his father – the greatest novelist of the 20th century. (I must confess that I knew Bron – a great friend of my parents and very kind to me as a child; always a good sign.) To possess one of these attributes is impressive enough – to have all of them is unique.

The collection, as has been noted in earlier posts, is edited by Naim Attallah and consists to a large extent of reprints of articles from Literary Review when Auberon was editor and Attallah publisher. Mount offers this comment on the collection:

What a joy to read an anthology of the best of Bron’s writing. But this isn’t it – you’re better off with William Cook’s tremendous collection, Kiss Me, Chudleigh: The World According to Auberon Waugh. This book is more The World According to Naim Attallah, who owned the Literary Review, edited by Bron. […] Space that could have been taken up by more of Bron’s sublime prose is given over to these paeans of praise to Attallah.

Finally, back in The Oldie, they have posted an article about another complication that has arisen for the Brexit process. According to a Swedish report, this is caused by the geology of the tectonic plate under the North Sea bed which is rising much faster than the level of sea water. Ultimately, this will cause Britain to become reconnected to the continent by a land mass known as Doggerland. This process will require more than 1000 years to complete but, according to Dr Üre Haavinkürlaaf of the Üvebinhadt Institute of Tectonics in Stockholm :

“[…] at a conservative estimate, the change is so dramatic that if I live to be 88 [in 50 years’ time] and I’m fit enough, I’m confident I will be able to walk across the Channel and the water won’t rise above my waders.” The emerging land bridge to Continental Europe has no formal effect on Brexit negotiations. But becoming a physical part of Europe is bound to influence attitudes of the public in any second referendum.

The article was posted by Glaub Mirnicht on 1 April 2019.

All of The Oldie articles are posted on its weblog and the review is available on the Catholic Herald website at the links provided above.

 

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