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best things about ‘mad world - evelyn waugh and the secrets of brideshead’
- written by paula byrne, aka my tutor aka jonathan bate’s, jesus of shakespeare (to stanley wells’ god) wife
- PLATE SECTIONSSS!
среда, 27 июля 2011
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best things about ‘mad world - evelyn waugh and the secrets of brideshead’
- written by paula byrne, aka my tutor aka jonathan bate’s, jesus of shakespeare (to stanley wells’ god) wife
- PLATE SECTIONSSS!
contra mundum
best things about ‘mad world - evelyn waugh and the secrets of brideshead’
- written by paula byrne, aka my tutor aka jonathan bate’s, jesus of shakespeare (to stanley wells’ god) wife
- PLATE SECTIONSSS!
contra mundum
best things about ‘mad world - evelyn waugh and the secrets of brideshead’
- written by paula byrne, aka my tutor aka jonathan bate’s, jesus of shakespeare (to stanley wells’ god) wife
- PLATE SECTIONSSS!
contra mundum
best things about ‘mad world - evelyn waugh and the secrets of brideshead’
- written by paula byrne, aka my tutor aka jonathan bate’s, jesus of shakespeare (to stanley wells’ god) wife
- PLATE SECTIONSSS!
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Beautiful and Damned, Part 1.
The story of 1920s London’s Bright Young People is a tale of sex, drink, drugs and a gossip-hungry press. Beautiful and Damned traces the growth of 1920s London’s bright young party set whose antics were enjoyed and scorned in equal measures by a watching nation. And the more artistic of the merry band - Cecil Beaton, Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford among them - saw their work make the characters and attitudes of the era both legend and fable.
"The notion of homosexuality as being accepted is really key to that period, in a way. It’s what..."
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“The notion of homosexuality as being accepted is really key to that period, in a way. It’s what binds a lot of these people together. There’s a lot of lesbianism as well, because the first lesbian book, The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall is published around this time. This is the first time these ‘conditions’, as people would regard them, had been given names. No longer are their sexualities, or their otherness, a means of weakness or of attack, they’re means of strength. The gay characters in Brideshead Revisted, people like Anthony Blanche, who’s based on Brian Howard; these are people who are not effete, but were kind of ‘out’ about it, and very pugnacious about it. They were modern figures, and this is the way they saw the world going.”
- Philip Hoare, author of Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant. (via thebrightyoungpeople)
- Philip Hoare, author of Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant. (via thebrightyoungpeople)
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вторник, 26 июля 2011
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I am very fond of Evelyn Waugh’s memoir, A Little Learning. I like its careful, measured tones, and its detachment. Two of my favourite passages in it, though, were not written by Waugh himself, but come from letters he received from his friend and mentor Francis Crease, an eccentric recluse who tutored him in calligraphy. The first passage that struck me is about the love of beauty in life as well as in art:This evening while you were in Chapel was one of extraordinary splendour, and I wished you also might have been touched by it. For myself, the shadows of the prison house have fallen long ago, but now and again some shape of beauty lifts the shadow for a time. It is so much easier to feel one could write “Resentment Poems” than “Songs of Exuberance”; I hope it may never be so with you.
What I have in mind is the hope that you, like so many others of intelligence, may not run after definitions of Art and Beauty and the like, feeling the definition and failing to feel the Beauty itself as it approaches on an evening like this evening. I can think of an Oxford friend at this moment who feels nature described in a sonnet and sitting in his arm-chair, but seems to fail in the open air. And again I remember a Don at Oxford learned in Greek gems telling me how all the other Dons would be interested in curious knowledge and facts about any gem, but its beauty always, or nearly always escaped them.
No Flemish painter of the seventeenth century or English school of the nineteenth could hope to convey more than a suggestion of the visionary splendour of this evening.
Another passage from a letter by Mr Crease, on friendship, also made a strong impression on me; it was written in response to a complaint by Waugh that he lacked any sense of purpose in his life:What you ask today to have, no one has completely and indeed many of the best only have sufficient light for the day or the nearest duty. You will not be humble - humility seldom appeals to youth — but nothing less will do…You must have sufficient light to know of the day of small things that surround you when you are at School or at home. If you despise them darkness will come not light. It is only by doing them that more light will come that is any true light. Success and conceit close the windows. You have more light than most, far more. What is the matter is impatience nothing more or less — I can be as direct as you sometimes and you don’t like it so much in others as in yourself — but it is good for you. You want a friend who is a thorn in the flesh not an echo. I shall disappoint you in many things — Alas! that it must be so — but in this I will not disappoint you. [Emphasis mine]
Since I first read that, I’ve tried to remind myself in moments of crisis with friends that I need a “thorn in my side” rather than an “echo”. Of course, it doesn’t do to turn it the other way around and think overmuch about ways to become a thorn in the side to one’s friends. Best to let this perception of you develop in them naturally, as it almost certainly will, over time.
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By the way, the photo is from one of the tombs in the Christ Church College cathedral. During the Reformation, many of the heads of statues were destroyed as a kind of symbolic destruction.
понедельник, 25 июля 2011
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took about a million screenshots of the bbcfour documentary about the ‘bright young things’ in the 1920s/30s. they’re so fascinating. stephen tennant is my new favourite person