Bullying in the House?

Posted on November 19, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In the 1960 BBC interview of Evelyn Waugh in the Face to Face series, presenter John Freeman posed a series of questions about Waugh’s career at Oxford. Among them are these relating to his children:

Q. Are any of your children old enough now to be at Oxford?

A. One’s gone down, one’s up there now.

Q. Are either of them at your own college? –well, one’s a girl, I believe?

A. The girl’s gone down, she couldn’t go to Hertford, no. The boy’s at the House. (CWEW, v. 19, A Little Learning, p. 558)

Neither of them feels it necessary to explain that Waugh’s answer refers to his son Auberon’s recent matriculation at Christ Church. For the record, Freeman’s college was Brasenose.

The Guardian recently reported something of a scandal at todays’s Christ Church. The present Dean, who has sought to reform some of the college’s arcane procedures and practices, is being “investigated” in a proceeding started by what is described as a “formal complaint […] filed against the Very Rev Martyn Percy with the college’s governing body. Few people know details of what is being alleged, or who is behind the move. Even Percy is largely in the dark, according to his friends. The complaint is believed to centre on issues of governance; no one is suggesting improper personal conduct. It will be heard by a tribunal, which could dismiss Percy. A date for a hearing is yet to be set.”

To provide some context, the article, by Harriet Sherwood, opens with this description of the college:

It is a quintessential institution of the establishment, producing 13 British prime ministers, 10 chancellors of the exchequer and 17 archbishops. Among its former students are King Edward VII, Albert Einstein, Lewis Carroll and WH Auden. One fictional alumnus, Lord Sebastian Flyte, came to personify its privileges in the pages of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

The Guardian, which seems to sympathize with the Dean in this case, questions whether he is being bullied by a cabal of insiders who want to stop his reforms.

Waugh’s placement of Sebastian at Christ Church was probably at one with his snobbish reference to his son’s college in the BBC interview. Sebastian’s primary models, Alastair Graham and Hugh Lygon, were at Brasenose and Pembroke, respectively. Waugh himself told John Freeman that his own first choice would have been New College where his father was a student.  But Christ Church was socially superior to any of those, in Waugh’s eyes at least. And it was the college of his friend Harold Acton, a contributor to the character of Anthony Blanche, who, in turn, recited The Waste Land from a Christ Church balcony.

Auberon in his 1991 autobiography Will This Do? (p. 137) explains that in June 1960 when his father was interviewed, he was unaware that Auberon would not be returning to the “House”, having failed his preliminary exams:

I had done no work and realized that I had no chance of passing. […] My father had generously said he would pay for the long vacation holiday on condition that I passed prelims. Since the results would not appear until the end of vacation, he had to accept my assurance that I would pass.

 

 

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Travel Writers and Catholic Writers

Posted on November 18, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

In a long essay in The Smart Set (an online cultural magazine based in Philadelphia), Thomas Swick traces his career as a travel writer. In doing so, he also recounts the history of that literary genre in the 20th century. It flourished in the 20s and 30s. then died during and after the war only to pick up again in the 1970s.  Although he never mentions any of Waugh’s travel books as having particularly influenced him, Swick does mention Waugh in the context of the changes within the travel writng genre:

I had long been attracted to, which meant I was heavily influenced by, British writers, not just in the field of travel, where they excelled, but in the realm of succinct, subtle, dryly humorous prose. And this put me at odds with the American penchant for rambling, word-drunk, often overly earnest texts. The British tendency was to hold things back, while the American one – beginning long before the ’60s – was to let it all out. I much preferred the Latinate sentences of Evelyn Waugh to the overstuffed ones of Thomas – and now Tom – Wolfe. Of course, Fitzgerald had written beautifully measured lines, and Hemingway’s had had a revolutionary leanness, but our contemporary writers – from Mailer to Styron to Bellow to Irving – were all enamored of the sound of their own typing. In travel, Bruce Chatwin had a lapidary crispness that Paul Theroux, for all his Anglophilia, lacked. Instead of understatement, the Americans gave me gonzo.

After discussing his various attempts, mostly unsuccessful, to break into travel writing, Swick found his opportunity in the new wave of travel writing inspired by Paul Fussell’s Abroad and an issue of Granta devoted to travel writing as well as the success of Theroux and Chatwin:

Travel writers were no longer retreating from the scene in their books, letting the locals and their environs speak for themselves; they were the main characters in nonfictional picaresques. They took Evelyn Waugh’s first-person junkets to a higher, more plot-driven level. In Old Glory, published in 1981, the British writer Jonathan Raban sailed the length of the Mississippi River, capturing memorable people and moments but also telling of his personal journey – an adult, solitary, immigrant Huck Finn whose downriver progress was momentarily halted by an affair in St. Louis. Like Theroux, he was infusing and enriching the travel book with elements from the novel, not the least of which were narrative arc and engaging protagonist. Readers could eagerly follow the account of the author’s passage while, almost subliminally, learning about the lands he passed through.

Unlike Theroux, Raban brought a foreign eye to familiar places, which was also a feature of some of the new travel writing. In a world that was increasingly being visited by tourists, he went where the tourists lived, in this case, the small towns and prosaic cities along the Mississippi. And using his deft analytical skills – aided by a formidable knowledge of history and literature, geography and religion – he was able to make his readers see them anew. Interpreting a landscape, wresting out its meanings as opposed to simply describing its features, was another aspect of the new travel writing, one that was essential with the growing ubiquity of the camera.

Swick finally reached his goal of establishing himself as a travel writer and the results can be seen in his book The Joys of Travel: And Stories That Illuminate Them. Although not mentioned, there is a possible interesting connection between Waugh and Raban. Catherine Waugh, Evelyn’s mother, was from a family named Raban, a less common name even than Waugh. Jonathan Raban seems to be working on an autobiography of some sort, having recently published essays about his parents and childhood in recent LRB articles, but never seems to have explored this question of a relationship with those other novelist-travel writers, the Waughs.  Or perhaps he has and I missed it? Comments invited below.

The TLS in this week’s “NB” column includes a discussion by columnist J.C. of “Catholic scribes”. This was inspired, as are many of the discussions in his column, by the recent acquisition of a book from a bookstall during one of his “perambulations”. In this case it was

…Altar &Pew, edited by John Betjeman, a little anthology in the Pocket Poets series published by Vista Books in the 1950s […] (£1 from a Charing Cross Road barrow). The topic is “Church of England verses”, but you won’t find any more of those nowadays than you will Catholic novels. […]

What happened to all the Catholic writers? Once, they were legion. Graham Greene is probably the most reputable, part of the attraction being that he gloried in the disreputable. Evelyn Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930, at the age of twenty-seven, explaining later that he had realized that life was “unintelligible and unendurable without God”. Muriel Spark, a protégé of both Greene and Waugh, left behind her Jewish family background and Edinburgh’s Calvinist air, to embrace the Roman faith in the mid-1950s. These three were converts; Anthony Burgess was a cradle Catholic. Hilaire Belloc converted from having lapsed, if that makes theological sense. […] In our age of brutalist profanity, who will guide us through death’s dark vale? David Lodge and Piers Paul Read are perhaps the closest we have to inheritors of the Catholic strain in literature.[…] It is hard to imagine a successful contemporary writer saying, as Waugh did, that he or she found life unintelligible without God. Much more trendy to say the opposite: that life is unintelligible with Him. Betjeman’s anthology ends with Philip Larkin, the youngest writer in the book (thirty-seven at the time of publication). The poem is “Church Going”:
Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.

Thanks to a reader for sending a link. The full article is behind a paywall.

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BBC Radio 4 to Rebroadcast Waugh Stories

Posted on November 17, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

BBC Radio 4 Extra will next week rebroadcast readings of three Evelyn Waugh short stories. Each broadcast will last 15 minutes:

“Cruise”: Tuesday, 20 November, 11am. This was first broadcast in 2007 and is read by Abigail Docherty. It was originally published in Harper’s Bazaar, London, February 1933. (“Sailing round the Mediterranean, a young lady writes about the upper-class antics on board ship.”)

“Portrait of a Young Man”/”The Sympathetic Passenger”: Wednesday, 21 November, 11am. This was first broadcast in 2003 and is read by Crawford Logan. These stories were originally published, respectively, in The Isis, 30 May 1923 and The Daily Mail, 4 May 1939. (“A showcase of the author’s wit and irony – two tales of an unwanted guest and an outspoken hitch-hiker.”)

“The Manager of the Kremlin”: Thursday, 22 November, 11am. This story was first broadcast in 2003 and is read by Crawford Logan. It was originally published in John Bull,  15 February 1930. (“A refugee from the Russian Revolution finds himself running a successful night club in Montmartre.”)

All the stories will be available to hear over the internet on BBC iPlayer after the scheduled broadcasts. All are available in Waugh’s Complete Stories.

 

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Books: Waugh and Trump and Amis

Posted on November 16, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

This week’s New York Review of Books has as its lead review a book by Michael Lewis called The Fifth Risk. This is is about governmental dysfunction in the present USA administration and is reviewed by Fintan O’Toole, who opens with this:

Writing about her friend the famously unpleasant Evelyn Waugh, Frances Donaldson reflected that

“the weakness in attributing any particular quality to Evelyn is that he could not allow anyone to dictate his attitude or virtues to him. Consequently, if he was accused of some quality usually regarded as contemptible, where other men would be aroused to shame or hypocrisy, he studied it, polished up his performance, and, treating it as both normal and admirable, made it his own…. Consequently, it was never any good looking straight at him to learn the truth about him.”

Donald Trump is not often compared to a great English novelist, and the word “studied” does not apply—he is all instinct. But his instincts lead him in precisely the same direction. He disorients us by wearing his most contemptible qualities as if they were crown jewels, by brandishing as trophies what others would conceal as shameful secrets. He uses his dirty linen as a cloth with which to polish up his performance.

There then follow several examples, none of which reminded me much of any bad behavior ever charged to Evelyn Waugh. Perhaps that’s not the point, however; and the rest of the review is behind a paywall.

The Boston Globe, meanwhile, has interviewed Ben Macintyre who is in the USA promoting his new book The Spy and the Traitor, about Cold War double agent Oleg Gordievski. When asked what books he is currently reading, Macintyre answered:

I always have three or four books on the go. It might be a sign of incipient madness. I’m reading Jonathan Coe’s new book “Middle England,” which is a hysterical, satirical look at Brexit. He also wrote “The Rotters’ Club,” which is good fun. I’m also plowing my way through Christopher Andrew’s magisterial “The Secret World,” a history of intelligence from classical times to now. He pretty much invented intelligence studies in Britain. I’ve been rereading quite a bit of Evelyn Waugh. I think a lot of the writers from his era haven’t survived. For example, I don’t think people read Kingsley Amis anymore. Waugh is the one who stands the test of the time. His novel “Scoop” never fails to make me think that what we journalists do is both noble and idiotic.

It is interesting that Macintyre considers Amis a writer “of Waugh’s era” since he was usually thought of as some one from the next or “post war” generation of “Angry Young Men” that followed those who flowered in Waugh’s “interwar” era of “Bright Young People”. But Macintyre’s discussion suggests that younger readers now look at the 2oth century literature in larger chunks of time.

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Oxford Trails and Roman Holidays

Posted on November 15, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The Oxford Mail has reported the Ashmolean Museum’s exhibit No Offence: Exploring LGBTQ+ Histories and notes an adjunct:

…the exhibition traverses epochs and continents, deftly showing the numerous ways in which LGBTQ+ lives and loves have been expressed across cultures and throughout history. But here in Oxford we do not have to look elsewhere to appreciate LGBTQ+ history and heritage. Our great city has been a hub of queer life and culture for centuries [… Reporter Naomi Herring’s] new app-based city trail produced to coincide with the Ashmolean’s No Offence exhibition, foregrounds just some of the stories which makes Oxford one of the world’s most extraordinary queer localities.

Here’s a description of one of the sites identified on Naomi Herring’s trail:

[…] Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) was founded on his undergraduate life at Hertford College during the early 1920s, but the full depth and breadth of LGBTQ+ experiences in the city that [Oscar] Wilde called ‘the capital of romance’ is only now being appreciated.

The Ashmolean’s exhibit continues through 2 December but the LGBTQ+ trail will presumably survive beyond the exhibit’s closure. I was unable to locate a link to Naomi’s “app-based trail”.

Oxford graduate, journalist and novelist James Delingpole has reported in his Spectator column on his recent trip to Rome. He found the museums (especially at the Vatican) underwhelming and overtiring but the food sublime (especially a spaghetti carbonara sampled in Testaccio). On the basis of the trip, he asked himself:

Is [a trip to Rome] worth it? Only so you can knock it off the list of items on your bucket list and then tell all your friends how thoroughly overrated it is. St Peter’s Basilica especially. What a blowsy, kitsch monstrosity that is. Some of my best friends are Catholics — the soundest of the sound — and I’ve occasionally toyed with the idea of doing an Evelyn Waugh and joining them. But I didn’t come away thinking that the papacy is a very good recruitment advert.

In his Thinly Disguised Autobiography (2003) Delingpole may have inadvertently contributed some sites on the Oxford Mail’s LGBTQ+ trail. The early Oxford chapters of the book are replete with allusions to Brideshead Revisited such as this:

..Rufus proposes a visit to George’s Wine Bar so that we can get very,very drunk. We order our usual Brandy Alexanders–creme de cacao, brandy and fresh cream. It’s what Anthony Blanche drinks with Charles Ryder…so it’s what we must drink too. (p. 17)

That is apparently the same “George bar” where Charles watched Anthony down four of the drinks (called “Alexandra cocktails” in Waugh’s novel, May 1945 edition, p. 43). The antihero of Delingpole’s novel, however, is at pains to disavow any homosexuality on his part despite constant ragging by his chums, so any associations of the novel with the trail might better be avoided.

Perhaps now that Delingpole is back home, he can finish the third volume of his “Coward in WWII” series entitled Coward in the Woods. It has been listed on Amazon since 2012 and has been duly assigned ISBNs, but its appearance is still mysteriously delayed.

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Waugh Event in Milan

Posted on November 14, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

The British Council in Milan has announced a presentation relating to Evelyn Waugh later this week.  Here are the details:

On occasion of the 2018 edition of Bookcity, the British Council Milan, in collaboration with the Department of Modern Languages of Milan University, will host the editors of Evelyn Waugh’s complete works

On occasion of the Bookcity event Martin Stannard (University of Leicester), Sharon Ouditt (Nottingham Trent University), Simon James (University of Durham), Rebecca Moore (University of Leicester) and Roger Irwin (Oxford) will discuss several aspects of Waugh’s creative achievement and his reception in Italy with Giovanni Iamartino and Sara Sullam (University of Milan), and Ottavio Fatica, author of the latest translation of Brideshead Revisited (Bompiani 2009).

During the two weeks preceding the event, the British Council will host an exhibition of materials related to Waugh’s Italian fortune.

The presentation will take place on Saturday, 17 November, 17:00-19:00pm, at the British Council in Milan, via Manzoni 38. Booking is available here. There is no charge. Thanks to Waugh Society member Milena Borden for sending a link.

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2018 John H. Wilson Jr. Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest

Posted on November 13, 2018 by Antony F. P. Vickery

Essays by undergraduates on the life and work of Evelyn Waugh are solicited for the 2018 John H. Wilson Jr. Evelyn Waugh Undergraduate Essay Contest. The contest is sponsored by Evelyn Waugh Studies, the journal of the Evelyn Waugh Society, whose editorial board will judge the submissions.

  • Subject: Any aspect of the life or work of Evelyn Waugh
  • Prize: $500
  • Limit: 5,000 words, approximately 20 pages
  • Submission Deadline: December 31, 2018

Undergraduates in any part of the world are eligible to enter. The winning essay will be published in the journal and the author will receive a prize of $500 (US).

Entries (in English, please) should be directed by email to (click to email).

Academics are encouraged to print the contest flier and post it in their departments.

“There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit.” — Decline and Fall (1928)

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Waugh’s Signature, Favorite Dublin Pub, Lost in Translation, Etc.

Posted on November 13, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

–Duncan McLaren has posted a short note on Waugh’s change in his signature at an early stage in his career. This is posted on his website under WAUGH BITES. McLaren is able to triangulate that change in the early 1930’s by comparing signatures in signed book copies of the period, examples of which are posted. I have always thought that the “E” in the new style looks suspiciously like a handwritten pound sign–if you leave off the top horizontal bar. Probably not intended, as Waugh was not exactly rolling in money at the time, but was doing well for a newly minted novelist.

–An Irish “publog” called Publin has reposted a listing of Dublin public houses visited by James Joyce and described in his novel Ulysses. These are included in an annual pubcrawl on what is called “Bloomsday” based on Joyce’s novel. Among the listed venues is this one:

The Bailey pub, formerly The Maltings, had always been a hub of literary and political activity. Prior to John Ryan’s acquiring it, it had welcomed international artists such as Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, and Charles Chaplin, as well as being popular with local figures like Oliver St. John Gogarty, Pádraig Colum and Thomas Kettle. […] Under John Ryan’s direction the pub again became fertile ground for artists and writers in the 1950s and 60s. Ryan maintained close relationships with all of the significant figures of this period, such as Patrick Kavanagh, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Brian O’Nolan and J. P. Donleavy, many of whom he also supported financially.

It was in this context that Bloomsday, a celebration of Joyce’s Ulysses, first emerged. Ryan arranged for two horse drawn carriages to take participants from the Martello Tower in Sandycove, where the novel begins, across the city, following in the footsteps of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus. Present were Kavanagh and O’Nolan, as well as the architect Michael Scott, critic Anthony Cronin and Joyce’s cousin Tom Joyce. As they progressed through their journey the cortege stopped frequently at pubs and by the time they reached the city centre, exhausted and inebriated, they abandoned the expedition for welcoming warmth of The Bailey.

No details of Waugh’s visit(s) to this establishment are provided. He didn’t spend a lot of time in Dublin but did stop there on his way to visit his Anglo-Irish friends in their country houses and actually shopped around the outreaches of the city looking for a place to live after the war. It seems unlikely that he would choose this pub for its Joycean associations since Joyce was not a writer Waugh admired, but it does seem to have been widely accepted by others in the trade so that might explain his visit(s).

—BBC Radio 4 has reposted a 2007 broadcast of its books interview program A Good Read. The panel includes poet/critic Andrew Motion and investigative journalist Roger Cook and is presented by Sue MacGregor. The Waugh novel discussed is Scoop and that discussion comes at the beginning of the 30-minute program.  It is available on the internet via BBC iPlayer.

–A review of Brideshead Revisited is posted in Crisis Magazine, a digital religious journal maintained by Roman Catholic lay people. The review, entitled Stubborn Roots,  warns, inter alia,  that Brideshead is not an easy read and is not recommended for children. Among its many challenges is this:

A common way to misunderstand Brideshead Revisited is as an implicit condemnation of the Catholic faith, of the Catholic life, or at least the Catholic belief in the reality of evil and original sin. It may seem that every single Catholic character is unfulfilled directly because of a faith that thwarts love and happiness at every turn […] Almost everyone ends up being unhappy, from Rex Mottram to Hooper, and Catholic to non-Catholic. It is not Catholicism that is to blame, but aristocratic England, plebian England, individual vice, family pride, you, me, and fallen human nature. […]

–A blogger and fan of the film Lost in Translation, written and directed by Sofia Coppola, has posted an essay discussing why she still finds the film fascinating 15 years after its original release. The blogger, Mairead Small Staid, now age 30, makes several literary references, especially to JD Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, but also recalls this very funny line from the film:

“And the worst part was,” Franny tells her brother Zooey, “I knew what a bore I was being, I knew how I was depressing people, or even hurting their feelings—but I just couldn’t stop! I just could not stop picking.” Charlotte [the young female lead character played  by Scarlett Johannsen], too, can’t stop picking, but when she tries to find an ally in her clueless husband, to make light of her ill-tempered state—“Evelyn Waugh was a man,” she confides as if sharing a gleeful secret—she’s met with admonishment. “Not everybody went to Yale,” her husband scolds.

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Martin Stannard to Lecture at Durham

Posted on November 11, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Durham University has announced that Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh’s biographer and co-executive editor of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, will lecture there early next year. His topic will be “Evelyn Waugh, America and Catholicism”. This will probably touch on Waugh’s 1949 article in Life Magazine entitled “The American Epoch in the Catholic Church” (EAR, pp. 377-88) as well his 1948 and 1949 trips to North America researching that article. The lecture will be delivered at Ushaw College, Durham University at 17:30p on Tuesday, 12 February 2019. This is part of the Ushaw Lecture Series sponsored by the university’s Department of Theology and Religion.

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Post-Election Roundup

Posted on November 10, 2018 by Jeffrey Manley

Having recovered from the news deluge of the USA midterm elections, we can now return to coverage of matters Wavian:

–The big story in British journalism earlier this week was Paul Dacre’s valedictory address as editor of the Daily Mail, as he moves over to a corporate managerial position in the paper’s owner, Associated Newspapers. Most coverage of his speech focused on his perceived need to regulate digital news sources such as Facebook, Google and Apple instead of picking on print media such as the Daily Mail. The unregulated online news coverage is seen by him as full of fake news and biased political stories. He seems to offer this in contrast to the “regulated” and, presumably, unbiased coverage that appears in the print media, such as the Daily Mail. (I must have missed that unbiased edition of the Mail, but then I don’t read it every day.) He also takes the opportunity to criticize the occasional rogue journalist that may be employed by one of his fellow like-minded newspapers, bringing Evelyn Waugh into that discussion:

One-time Maxwell henchman, Roy Greenslade, Editor of the Mirror during the “Spot the Ball” game scam, has reinvented himself as a Professor of Journalism. That such a mountebank teaches ethics is a satirical commentary on academia that the combined talents of Jonathan Swift and Evelyn Waugh would struggle to do justice to.

The Greenslade reference is explained in Wikipedia:

While editor of the Daily Mirror, Greenslade was at the centre of a controversy after he rigged a competition in the paper to make sure it was unwinnable. He admitted his behaviour in October 2011 at a seminar at the Leveson Inquiry: ″On behalf of my proprietor Robert Maxwell I fixed a game offering a million pounds to anyone who could spot the ball and ensured that no-one won. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa.″

Greenslade has gone over to what Dacre perceives to be the other side; he now writes for the Guardian (target of Dacre’s sharpest criticism among the print media) and teaches journalism at the City University. One wonders how Dacre himself would fare if examined by such as Swift or Waugh.

–An art movie venue in Amsterdam (Filmhuis Cavia) offered this description of the Hollywood film adaptation of The Loved One in its announcment of a screening of the film that took place last Tuesday:

This is a perfect example of loads of movies that once existed: films that satirized the American way of life and lambasted the entire patriotic, pro-war, pro-business landscape of America. It is the kind of biting satire that has been suspiciously missing from Hollywood cinema for the last 40 years. The closest thing I can think of is John Waters, but his films miss the edgy social criticism.

It is perhaps the amazing cast that helps make this insane, out-of-control movie so special… Rod Steiger as Mr.Joyboy, one of the creepiest morticians you will ever hope to see. His performance is sheer brilliance. But we also have Sir John Gielgud, Tab Hunter, Roddy McDowall, James Colburn – and the one and only, gay icon Liberace. The entire film explodes in a great climax, both poetic and sharply critical at the same time.  Expect a wild runaway horse, the kind of film that bolts and bucks, and you have to just hold on as tight as you fucking can.

–An article (“It’s not ‘Just a pet'”) in the suburban Chicago paper, the Daily Herald, discusses how its readers should cope with grieving for a deceased pet. In the context of her article, the reporter mentions Waugh’s 1948 novel:

Evelyn Waugh, the infamous British humorist, wrote a novel about pet cemeteries called The Loved One, many years ago. It was poking fun at the great lengths people will go to memorialize their pets, and about all the expense involved in pet care, pet cemeteries, etc. When I was much younger and didn’t understand, I thought it was funny indeed. And we used to marvel at the two huge aisles in the grocery store devoted to pet supplies, pet food, pet toys. But of course, now I do understand — we take care of them, love them, and the death of a pet is very sad to their humans. And I don’t bat an eyelash paying a vet for medical care. And I would buy a gravestone or other memorial.

–The magazine History Today offers an article on kedgeree that provides an explanation of the source, recipes for and importance of that smoked-fish dish to British cuisine. This appears in the magazine’s “Historian’s Cookbook” column:

By the early 20th century, [kedgeree had become] associated not only with aristocratic tastes, but also with extravagance, even decadence. In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), for example, Charles Ryder orders salmon kedgeree after beginning an adulterous affair on board an ocean-liner. Similarly, in his memoirs, Anthony Powell shares the amazement of a Sheffield fishmonger when Edith Sitwell attempted to buy a salmon ‘for making kedgeree’ at the height of the Second World War (‘Had the days of the Bourbons returned?’).

–The Irish fashion and design magazine Image carries on its website a selection of the 40 books one should read before reaching the age of 40. The selection criteria are briefly described by writer Sophie White before she launches the list:

Initially I tried to limit the inclusions by utilising sub headings. I opted for Heavy Hitters, Thinkers and Bangers as my categories. Heavy Hitters being the big ‘uns, the Dickens, Dostoevskys and De Beauvoirs, the Thinkers being the ones that ain’t pretty necessarily, but leave you changed none the less. … The Bangers are what it says on the tin – books you’ll return to again and again. The Joy-givers, the comfort-reads and the day makers – basically anything by Marian Keyes, Donna Tartt and Evelyn Waugh.

Here’s the description of her Waugh selection:

Brideshead Revisited. A tale of nostalgia, faded glamour and unrequited love. Waugh’s classic made Jeremy Irons an unlikely sex symbol and solidified our obsession with the doomed Marchmain family.

It should be noted that Waugh’s book is the only one from a writer of his interwar generation to make the list.

–The Italian language religious website Radio Spada is offering a series of translations into Italian of Waugh’s writings on the Second Vatican Council. Here’s a translation of an excerpt from the article announcing this project:

…until the end of his days…Waugh and a few others  fought with articles, armed only with a typewriter, [waging] a daily battle against rampant heterodoxy. Also in his powerful collection of letters – published in 1980 and edited by Mark Amory – several letters can be found that deal more or less directly with the issues debated at the Council. In 1996 these letters were assembled by Alcuin Reid in a small volume, A Bitter Trial, subsequently expanded and republished in second edition in 2011 by Ignatius Press. This column, which debuts with this article, wants to present for the first time to the Italian public the more significant excerpts from Waugh’s epistles on the Second Vatican Council. What will emerge is a scathing portrait, never banal, with viriolic opinions, crossed by the same satirical vein that is the characteristic feature of the novels of the English writer. On the other hand, it is well known that in the face of misfortune it is sometimes better to laugh than to cry.

The translation into English is by Google with minor edits.

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