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“... in some of these views (and certainly the more formal diary of Pepys’s friend and contemporary John Evelyn is consciously scientific in its interests), but it is painfully reductive to see Pepys’s diary as a piece of double-entry book-keeping of the soul, or as a spiritual equivalent to the microscope Robert Hooke was using in the 1660s to count the ...”

“... Who said of whom: ‘I have talent but he has genius’? Evelyn Waugh had been reading Futility, which first came out in 1922, but his favourite Gerhardie novel was to be Jazz and Jasper. This almost forgotten work appeared in 1927, two years earlier than Vile Bodies. Its author wanted to call it Doom, a title not adopted until the 1974 edition ...”

“... In a letter to Cyril Connolly in 1948 Evelyn Waugh listed the ideas that had been in his mind when he was at work on The Loved One: immediately after ‘over-excitement with the scene at Forest Lawn’ came ‘The Anglo-American impasse. Never the twain shall meet.’ Not a new thought even thirty years ago, but, though we may run into one another occasionally in the corridors of the Humanity Research Center of the University of Texas (their territory), or share a train compartment on the way to Combe Florey (ours), it still holds good for those in the Waugh industry ...”

“... Evelyn Waugh never wanted to be a writer, still less a novelist. That may explain both the weakness of his books and their remarkable and continuing popularity. Readers love an amateur with no intellectual pretensions – one of themselves, in fact – who is also an expert craftsman: and Waugh’s novels are as solidly made as the best furniture ...”

“... It should now be generally agreed except possibly in the Fens that Evelyn Waugh was the greatest English novelist of his generation. Certainly Graham Greene, Henry Green and Angus Wilson thought so, although they and not he won the worldly honours Waugh would dearly have loved. On the other hand, that redoubtable holder of the Order of Merit, J ...”

“... family in that part of Gloucestershire where the Cotswolds meet the Severn, since then the home of Evelyn Waugh (temporarily: the ghost of Tyndale got the better of him), of a bird sanctuary and a power station. Then it was most famous for the cloth trade, which gave Tyndale plenty of support during his life. He went to Oxford, where he discovered Erasmus, and ...”

“... Writing in the Tablet in 1951, Evelyn Waugh described Christopher Isherwood as the best of those British writers who had ‘captured’ the Thirties. It was not, Waugh being Waugh, high praise. Auden he felt to be a mysterious cove comprehensible only to his pals (among whom Waugh did not number himself). Stephen Spender, Waugh declared, had been granted at birth all the fashionable literary neuroses but his fairy godmother ‘quite forgot the gift of literary skill ...”

“... The external paraphernalia of Evelyn Waugh included check suits, an ear-trumpet, a watch-chain, cigars, unfashionable Victorian paintings, a large family and a West Country manor house. To those interested by what lay behind these characteristically English defences, this selection of his letters may come as a disappointment ...”

“... a bit of a lightweight, a ‘natural number two’ who should never have become prime minister. John Grigg wrote of him before the Suez crisis: ‘Popularity means much more to him than it ever should mean to a statesman. Since the early days, when he was idolised by millions on account of his personal appearance and blameless views, he has never lost the ...”

“... while fashionable enough to be taken for granted, is both demanding and problematic. His heroine, Evelyn Tradescant, not long down from Newnham, finds herself drawn into the orbit of an elderly German, Baron Dietrich Gormann, known to his friends as ‘Theo’. This mysterious figure, once, some suspect, a Nazi sympathiser, but recently an Aldermaston ...”

“... it. You have a go.’ George Carman was born in 1929, in Blackpool, to Albert, an auctioneer, and Evelyn, a seamstress turned dress-shop owner. Evelyn was Irish; Albert a former Black and Tan. Carman despised his father and doted on his perfectionist mother, who thought the world of him. They shared an obsession with ...”

“... the Emperor Frederick II in the 12th century and by the philosopher Albert the Great in the 13th. John Gerard had resurrected the belief in his Herball in 1597. In sum, then, the separation of man and the natural world was not a new phenomenon, invented as mankind for the first time gained complete mastery over nature. For though we are told that in the 17th ...”

“... lover Gaston Palewski (‘Colonel’), she reports that Odette Massigli is having an affair with John Lehmann, who had never liked women before’. ‘Are you shrieking, Colonel?’ One hopes that he was. ‘I have been screaming with laughter for several days on end,’ Nancy reports, after reading a life of Queen Victoria. The French General Election of ...”

“... Chanler clan, in the late 19th century, included II orphaned siblings maternally descended from John Jacob Astor. The eldest orphan had eight children, one of whom married Stanford White’s only child Lawrence. This Chanler lady, if you remember, became ‘Mama’ – Lessard’s grandmother with the second-generation liquid jewel/wine face. The Chanlers ...”

“... Dorothy Wordsworth makes it clear whose eyes her own journal is for, after William and his brother John had left her in Trasmere, and set off to walk into Yorkshire, ‘cold pork in their pockets’: ‘I resolved to write a journal of the time till W and J return, and I set about keeping my resolve, because I will not quarrel with myself, and because I shall ...”