Bryony Lavery Takes Flyte
Inside a new production of Brideshead Revisited, York Theatre Royal There is a moment in Brideshead Revisited when Charles Ryder observes to Julia Flyte that he and she could be characters in a play: “It’s like the setting of a comedy,” I said. “Scene: a baroque fountain in a nobleman’s grounds. Act one, sunset; act […]
Listening to Winnifred
About two years ago, Alexander Waugh acquired the personal archive of the Canadian scholar Winnifred M. Bogaards. Dr Bogaards is a hugely important figure for the Waugh project; she collaborated with Charles Linck, Bob Davis and Don Gallagher to create the first comprehensive bibliography of Evelyn Waugh in 1986 (which we are now digitising and updating) […]
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, […]
Face to face with Waugh: John Freeman (1915-2014)
On 20 December last year John Freeman – soldier, Labour politician and television interviewer – died aged 99. As an interviewer for the BBC, Freeman will be remembered for his series Face to Face (1959-62) with its distinctive format and Freeman’s brand of incisive questioning. His style was at the core of the show’s depth […]
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 […]
Merry? Christmas
‘The most wonderful time of the year’ is quickly approaching. Over the next week or so many of us will skitter into the overheated realms of corporate Christmas in a slight panic, hoping to find the perfect present. However, Evelyn Waugh was particularly dismayed in 1946 to find that hardly any of his […]
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, […]
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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