Barbara Cooke
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Book Group: A Tourist in Africa
Before last Saturday, I kept quiet about A Tourist in Africa’s reputation as Waugh’s ‘worst book’. Why prejudge the issue? The travelogue was specially requested by a member of the group – if he’d enjoyed it, why shouldn’t the rest of us? In the event, we did more than enjoy it. For many of us, […]
Book Group: Pigeon Pie
The group was in fine form this Saturday as we met to discuss a ‘non-Waugh’ book for the first time. Original members have worked through nearly all Waugh’s fiction now, so we are looking for ways to branch out without losing the interest that binds us together – one way, we thought, was to read […]
Book Group: Scoop
How can a book be so current and so dated at the same time? This was at the forefront of our minds as we met to discuss Waugh’s 1938 parody of Fleet Street and the world of foreign correspondents. The book is drawn from Waugh’s own experiences as a journalist in Abyssinia, but far more […]
Book Group: Unconditional Surrender
In January, a small cohort of the Book Group met to discuss the last book in Waugh’s “Sword of Honour” trilogy: Unconditional Surrender, which appeared for the first time in 1961. It nearly did not appear at all; Waugh struggled with its writing, and at one point it looked as if Officers and Gentlemen (1955) […]
Book Group: Officers and Gentlemen
The first thing we noticed about the second book in Waugh’s trilogy was the ambivalence of its title. Playing on the traditional description of a man as ‘an officer and a gentleman’, the plural form ‘officers and gentlemen’ instead implies that a man can be rather one or the other: and there are very few […]
Book Group: Men at Arms
It felt particularly apt to be discussing Men at Arms, the first in Waugh’s World War II trilogy, on remembrance weekend. Our thoughts naturally flowed from discussing this conflict to other wars, both distant and uncomfortably close. In this trilogy, Waugh is more overtly autobiographical than he has ever been before. While many of his […]
Party Like it’s 1929
You can now book your free place at this event here. What: Party like it’s 1929! Come to the Old Hundreth and celebrate with the Evelyn Waugh Book Group as we read extracts from our favourite Waugh books, ranging from the black comedy of A Handful of Dust to bittersweet Brideshead Revisited. Sip […]
Book Group: Late Short Stories
A sigh of relief was breathed by the Evelyn Waugh Book Group last Saturday when the cooling weather, at last, declared itself in sympathy with our tea and cake habit. Many Bakewell slices were consumed while we digested the contents of Evelyn Waugh’s later short stories. What counts as a “late” short story? For once, […]
The Sweet and Twenties
If you’re mad about the twenties, why not join us and Party Like it’s 1929? One of the most joyous things about my work as Research Associate on the Complete Works project is that it falls to me to keep the university library well stocked with all things Waugh. As well as ordering in […]
Book Group: Early Short Stories
The diversity of Waugh’s early short stories is such that the Book Group found themselves disappearing down many an illuminating tangent last Saturday. It’s taken me all day, for example, to remember why we ended up finding out that Amy’s grandmother was a hand model for Cutex (we got there via a discussion about Waugh’s stories […]
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