HAPPY BIRTHDAY – Evelyn Waugh, born 28 October 1903
“Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.”
Evelyn Waugh
My favourite of Waugh’s novels is Brideshead Revisited and I adore the TV series with Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons. However, it always puzzles me that it was written by a man who converted to Catholicism, as I feel the book is a warning not to become a Catholic. I grieve every time I read that Julia gives up Charles Ryder because of her religion. I love the novel’s nostalgia, its evocations of Oxford and Venice, and I adore the humour of Charles’s dreadful father at the dinner table.
Waugh’s life is also fascinating. I don’t think he was a very nice man, and he was certainly not a very happy one. I love the fact that he married a woman named Evelyn and they were known as He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn. I don’t think I’d have felt very comfortable meeting Evelyn Waugh.
Evelyn Waugh died on 25 July 1834, aged 61.
Tell me your thoughts in the comment area below.
A Brief Reading Guide to Evelyn Waugh
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
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David Brooke
Evelyn Waugh argued that civilization never recovered from the dissolution of the english monasteries in the 1530s. after that the cult of the individual, the political party, the ideology became all powerful- Hitler, Stalin, ISIS, Putin, Zionism etc etc.
Waugh was correct
Susannah Fullerton
That’s an interesting theory, though I am not sure I agree with it. What about personalities such as Genghis Khan? Will give it all more thought.