Word: waughs
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Brideshead Revisited has become one of the inescapable cultural objects of our - comparatively - recent times. Many otherwise sober critics and literary scholars regard the novel as Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece. I've always disagreed. I think his Sword of Honor trilogy is his great work - infinitely sadder and wiser - though for fall-about merriment it's hard to beat Scoop...
...This two-hour movie is in at least one way preferable both to the slow-moving novel and the endless television series. It requires of us about as much of our time and attention as Waugh's story demands. I'm as Anglophilic as the next person, but I'm also, by birth, a Middle-American Protestant-raised guy, taught to believe that we can make what we will of ourselves, unfettered by our parents' beliefs and our society's prejudice. This means that my patience with and sympathy for religious, ideological and class restraints on behavior - on our pursuits...
...aside and say, "Pull up your socks, boy." It is not necessarily inevitable that he end his life in a clinic in Morocco, totally decimated by drink. It is not inevitable that his sister abandon her rebellious engagement to Charles and accede to the family's tyrannical belief system. Waugh's whole narrative invites this kind of frustrated response. He wants to say something about the eternal values of the religious beliefs he converted to some 15 years before writing Brideshead. No matter how they inconvenience us, they are not, in his view, to be whimsically or lightly set aside...
...Evelyn Waugh doesn’t give us exciting heroes. The worlds he sketches are too full of cynicism, decay, and dissipation for shining personalities or unambiguous moral champions. But occasionally he gives us someone that we can get behind, a deeply flawed character who struggles mightily with issues of morality and faith and who eventually sacrifices personal happiness to do his duty. Guy Crouchback, the protagonist of Waugh’s 1950s “Sword of Honor” trilogy, is a specimen of this breed. When the middle-aged gentleman is introduced, he seems unlikely...
...island of Pemba has overcome obstacles. Just off the coast of Tanzania and north of Zanzibar, this small isle boasts few roads. Many parts are only accessible by boat. Then there are the dark arts. "Witch doctors will come to probe the deepest mysteries of voodoo," British author Evelyn Waugh wrote of Pemba in 1931. "Everything," he said, "is kept hidden from the Europeans...