Free Republic

More than 70 years ago, while on leave from the Royal Marines, Evelyn Waugh penned a portrait of a buccaneering moneyman with political ambitions and a hollow interior, a sketch that rings loud bells of familiarity in today’s presidential campaign. When Rex Mottram first appears in Brideshead Revisited, it’s not clear what the source of his wealth is. It certainly isn’t old money, like that of the aristocratic Flyte family to whose elder daughter, Julia, he pays court. Rex is very much the Modern Man: Having made his pile, he wants, and gets, the best cars, the best brandy, the...

Seventy-five years ago this week a revolution in crime-writing began when Knopf published The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler's first novel. Reviews in 1939 were wary and unenthusiastic, however, and only gradually was it recognised that Chandler had pulled off a bold fusion of highbrow and lowbrow – much-applauded by authors such as WH Auden, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, but also much-imitated by fellow chroniclers of murder.

This book has a very special appeal for those who love the Church and the traditional Latin Mass. It first appeared in Great Britain under the title Literary Converts, and then was reprinted by Ignatius Press in 1999 with the subtitle "Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief." I especially like the subtitle because this book has reinforced my faith today by affording me the company of the authors with whom I grew up: G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Ronald Knox, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Malcolm Muggeridge, and a host of others. My main interest in them today is that many...

When Evelyn Waugh died, only a bold man would have bet on his reputation. 1966 was the apotheosis of "Swinging London," but Waugh, while a Londoner born and bred, was the antithesis of swinging. Waugh was, in modern parlance, a snob, a racist, and a sexist. He was a self-styled "craftsman" who loathed proletarian culture. He was a political reactionary, and a lonely and anguished opponent of the Second Vatican Council that was soon to render unrecognizable his beloved Catholic Church. He was a man of the past. Of course anyone who had bet on Waugh then could easily retire...