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, […]
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 […]
I was recently in Oxford on the trail of Evelyn Waugh’s contributions to the University magazine The Isis. This was my first ever visit to Oxford, and though I was expecting to find the ‘gables and cupolas, exhal[ing] the soft airs of centuries of youth’, nothing quite prepared me for the outstanding beauty of […]
When journeying to Leicester on Monday morning, I was somewhat daunted by the prospect of the future week, a week where I would be experiencing the working life of the research associates on the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project here at the Univeristy. It was a relief, therefore, to be greeted at 9:15 by Barbara […]
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 […]
Eighty-six years ago today Evelyn Waugh married his first wife Evelyn Gardner at St Paul’s in Portman Square. The whole operation was carried off with characteristic nonchalance – on the 12th December 1927 Waugh wrote the following in his diary: ‘Dined with Evelyn at the Ritz. Proposed marriage. Inconclusive.’ The next day Gardner put Waugh […]
On Saturday morning, Manaus was the name on everybody’s lips. Not only was some football apparently going to be played there that evening, but this particular part of the Amazonian rainforest is also the last known whereabouts of Tony Last, hero of Waugh’s masterpiece A Handful of Dust. This 1934 novel marks a real shift in […]
As many of you might know already, in 2015 we are planning a glitzy international Evelyn Waugh conference here in Leicester. Richard III is SO 2013. If you’d like to present at the conference, please read on for the Call for Papers: Call for Papers The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project invites submissions for […]
On Saturday the 17th, taking refuge from the glorious May sunshine, the Evelyn Waugh Book Group met at Leicester Central Library to discuss Vile Bodies, Waugh’s second novel, published in 1930, and significantly, the last novel he wrote before his conversion to Catholicism. Part way through writing Vile Bodies, Waugh’s first wife, Evelyn Gardner, […]
Now, as you know, all our Evelyn Waugh Newsletter/Studies are available online – so I could just direct the interested to Volume 24 No 2 where, alongside the answers you’ve all been waiting for, you will also find a somewhat surprising article on Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder’s relationship and a thought-provoking discussion of literacy […]
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