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Mrs Stitch
Mrs. Algernon Stitch, more familiarly known as Julia Stitch, is a character created by Evelyn Waugh, best known for her role in the novel ''Scoop''. The character was inspired by Waugh's friendship with the well-connected socialite, Lady Diana Cooper. Mrs. Stitch appears as a "fixer", a well-connected member of British, and especially London society, who can make things happen for people. This activity is known to all as "The Stitch Service". In ''Scoop'', she is asked to find employment for a novelist by the name of John Courtenay Boot, and arranges for him to be sent as a journalist to cover a revolution in Africa. Due to a mixup, the distantly related and quite hapless William Boot is sent instead. When he returns triumphant, the accolades go instead to John Courtenay Boot, who did nothing to deserve them, allowing William Boot to return to his peaceful life writing articles about the British countryside. In the ''Sword of Honour'' trilogy, Mrs. Stitch appears briefly helping Guy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Evelyn Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (; 28 October 1903 – 10 April 1966) was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer. His most famous works include the early satires ''Decline and Fall'' (1928) and ''A Handful of Dust'' (1934), the novel ''Brideshead Revisited'' (1945), and the Second World War trilogy ''Sword of Honour'' (1952–1961). He is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century. Waugh was the son of a publisher, educated at Lancing College and then at Hertford College, Oxford. He worked briefly as a schoolmaster before he became a full-time writer. As a young man, he acquired many fashionable and aristocratic friends and developed a taste for country house society. He travelled extensively in the 1930s, often as a special newspaper correspondent; he reported from Ethiopian Empire, Abyssinia at the time of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935 Italian invasi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scoop (novel)
''Scoop'' is a 1938 novel by the English writer Evelyn Waugh. It is a satire of sensationalist journalism and foreign correspondents. Summary William Boot, a young man who lives in genteel poverty, far from the iniquities of London, contributes nature notes to Lord Copper's ''Daily Beast'', a national daily newspaper. He is dragooned into becoming a foreign correspondent, when the editors mistake him for John Courteney Boot, a fashionable novelist and a remote cousin. He is sent to Ishmaelia, a fictional state in East Africa, to report on the crisis there. Lord Copper believes it "a very promising little war" and proposes "to give it fullest publicity". Despite his total ineptitude, Boot accidentally gets the journalistic "scoop" of the title. When he returns, the credit goes to the other Boot and William is left to return to his bucolic pursuits, much to his relief. Background The novel is partly based on Waugh's experience of working for the ''Daily Mail'', when he was sent ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lady Diana Cooper
Diana, Viscountess Norwich (née Lady Diana Olivia Winifred Maud Manners; 29 August 1892 – 16 June 1986) was an English actress and aristocrat who was a well-known social figure in London and Paris. As a young woman, she moved in a celebrated group of intellectuals known as the Coterie, most of whom were killed in the First World War. She married one of the few survivors, Duff Cooper, later British ambassador to France. After his death, she wrote three volumes of memoirs which reveal much about early 20th-century upper-class life. Birth and youth Lady Diana Olivia Winifred Maud Manners was born at 23A Bruton Street in Mayfair, London, on 29 August 1892. Her mother, who was a devotee of the author George Meredith, named her daughter after the titular character in Meredith's novel ''Diana of the Crossways''. Officially the youngest daughter of the 8th Duke of Rutland and his wife, the Duchess of Rutland, Lady Diana's biological father was the writer Harry Cust. As early as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Boot
William Boot is a fictional journalist who is the protagonist in the 1938 Evelyn Waugh comic novel ''Scoop.'' Character Boot is the young author of a regular column on country life for a London newspaper named the ''Daily Beast''. His affected style is typified in the notorious sentence "Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole". After the ''Daily Beast's'' publisher mistakes him for the "real" war correspondent Henry Boot, William is sent abroad as a foreign correspondent to the fictional African state of Ishmaelia which is on the brink of a civil war. Although he is completely inept, he accidentally gets the 'scoop' of the title. Inspiration for character It has been suggested that Waugh based the character of William Boot on his own experiences and on the legendary journalist Bill Deedes; the two had reported together in 1936, trying to cover the Second Italo-Abyssinian War and Deedes arrived in Addis Ababa aged 22 with almost 600 pounds of luggage. D ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sword Of Honour
The ''Sword of Honour'' is a trilogy of novels by Evelyn Waugh which loosely parallel Waugh's experiences during the Second World War. Published by Chapman & Hall from 1952 to 1961, the novels are: ''Men at Arms'' (1952); ''Officers and Gentlemen'' (1955); and ''Unconditional Surrender'' (1961), marketed as ''The End of the Battle'' in the United States and Canada. Waugh received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for ''Men at Arms'' in 1952. Plot summary The protagonist is Guy Crouchback, heir of a declining aristocratic English Roman Catholic family. Guy has spent his thirties at the family villa in Italy shunning the world after the failure of his marriage and has decided to return to England at the very beginning of the Second World War, in the belief that the creeping evils of modernity, gradually apparent in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, have become all too clearly displayed as a real and embodied enemy. He attempts to join the Army, finally succeeding with t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Put Out More Flags
''Put Out More Flags'', the sixth novel by Evelyn Waugh, was first published by Chapman and Hall in 1942. The title comes from the saying of an anonymous Chinese sage, quoted and translated by Lin Yutang in ''The Importance of Living'' (1937): Dedicated to Randolph Churchill, who found a service commission for Waugh during the Second World War, the story is set in the first year of the war. It follows the activities of a cast of mostly upper-class British characters, some of them reintroduced from Waugh's earlier satirical novels ''Decline and Fall'', ''Vile Bodies'', and '' Black Mischief''. Facing first the dormant conflict of the Phoney War and then the cataclysmic events of 1940, peacetime lives of boredom and frivolity give way to a sense of purpose and solidarity. Plot At the country estate of Malfrey, Barbara Sothill loses her servants, who go off to work in factories, and her husband, who rejoins his reserve regiment. As district billeting officer, she has to find acco ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
