The following post is a collaboration between Barbara Cooke and Geoffrey Lewis This is a grotesquely comic story with numerous characters and a great deal of action. The sense of exhilaration keeps going to the end. Waugh’s skill lies in defining the characters so that they are not confused; the many contortions of the plot […]
On Monday 19th October Alexander Waugh, Evelyn’s grandson, gave a lecture on Combe Florey House (Evelyn’s last home) to the Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society. Alexander told us about Evelyn’s constant desire to change and improve his houses – as seen in the many alterations he made to Piers Court (where he lived from 1937-1956). […]
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 […]
Labels: A Mediterranean Journal Mr Evelyn Waugh, the author of “Decline and Fall,” is indiscreet, impudent, and amusing in Labels (Duckworth, 8s. 6d.), his account of a Mediterranean Cruise. He chastises several hotels, all trains, some ships, at least one volcano, to say nothing of Paris and Naples, for their shortcomings. But his vivid […]
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) […]
Something rather exciting happened to Alexander Waugh and me over the summer. When I have time I’ll tell you all about it, but for now the highlight is this: when digging around in Dr Winifred Bogaard’s personal archive, we found five, never before heard cassette tapes (I include an image for the benefit of younger […]
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, […]
Last month saw the international conference – Evelyn Waugh and His Circle: Reading and Editing the Complete Works finally come to fruition. It has been a common topic of conversation ever since I started working on the project in January 2014 but had always seemed strangely far off and abstract in the way big events […]
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 […]
The following is a guest post kindly supplied by Ben Doty. The upcoming conference Evelyn Waugh and His Circle has most of the regular staff at the blog tied up, so I offered to step in and report on April’s meeting of the book group. Put Out More Flags is a hidden gem among Waugh’s works, […]
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