Parody and Where Engels Fears to Tread “One always apologises for writing parodies; it is a disreputable activity, ranking only a little higher on the scale of literary activity than plagiarism. A minimum demand is that what is parodied be widely successful—a tulip craze of some sort. This gives the parodist the luxury of feeling that he is doing useful…
One thing leads to another. How do you get from the Daily Poem in the Paris Review to a re-read of The Loved One and an exploding portable toilet courtesy of Evelyn Waugh? Here’s the Annmarie Drury poem that caught my attention: Walking in Hills of Which One Has Seen Many Paintings Your task differs: to leave the world to…
I did, in the first weeks of the war, before I got my commission, suffer severely from ‘evacuees’.– Evelyn Waugh in a preface to Put Out More Flags complaining about evacuees much as he might have done about gout or rising damp. Evelyn Waugh is often at his most entertaining when he is at his most disagreeable. Reading Waugh – and…