Test

This novel is a creature of its time. It does not translate so effortlessly to a twenty-first century audience. But, it's certainly fun and witty; and it goes some way to rehabilitating Waugh. Given this is his first novel, I am intrigued to review his later works. 

There are no heros in this novel. Pennyfeather is the canvas of novel's characters' villainy, pretensions, and deficiencies. He is ridiculously naive and credulous; and projects Waugh’s satire and caricature. Pennyfeather fills the novel with his wit and chuckles. That wit is sometimes undercut by an enduring sense of tragedy (Lord Tangent’s death, as an example). 

Waugh's BBC interview depicts a somewhat stout if not cantankerous old bean; but I think he's most famously known as a very religious Catholic. Thus, the novel is quite surprising. Waugh is full of the joie de vivre and lampoons 1920s British society for its hypocrisy and hollowness of ideals and values.

It is interesting that his novel was dedicated to his contemporary Sir Harold Acton. Researching this chap a bit, it seems that he was a famous gay member of the Hypocrites Club; and that he may have had an affair with Evelyn Waugh. If so, it makes the book dedication very sweet. Its a fascinating aspect of Waugh before his later religiosity. (On the subject of religion, in Decline and Fall, Grimes hints at the interface of the religious instinct and sexual repression — a very interesting observation.)

At the end of the novel, there is an enigmatic allegory between life and riding a great wheel at a park. I have not been quite sure what Waugh was hoping to convey. Pennyfeather ends up where he started. Captain Grimes appears to have two resurrections. Is Waugh arguing that life is roundabout and circular?

-----

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

(Penguin Books 2012)

Please find below the updated HTML content with the requested `id` attributes added to the `

` tags: ``` html

Earlier this year, I went to the Courtauld Gallery to see a special exhibition of the masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection (of Winterthur, near Zurich). 

It was a wonderful show - full of exciting paintings which had never been seen in England before.

Oskar Reinhart was born from a wealthy Winterthur family who ran a leading international trading company. More interested in art than business, he began collecting seriously in 1919. He eventually had to step back from the firm to devote himself fully to building his collection. This included impressionists and Renaissance works. He built a gallery which he then bequeathed to the Swiss Confederation, which opened to the public in 1970.

Rating: 4/5 ★★★★☆

✲✲✲

Still Life with Three Salmon Steaks by Francisco de Goya

Wow. Breathtaking. 

This painting was part of a group of twelve still lifes painted by Francisco de Goya.

Painted during the Peninsular War - within the Napoleonic Wars - against Napoleon’s France.  According to the gallery:

Still life must have seemed a neutral subject matter at a time of censorship and political upheaval. However, the raw realism of these salmon steaks, isolated from any context, their flesh rendered in blood red, suggests the brutality of war. 

✲✲✲

Man with Delusions of Military Rank by Théodore Géricault

A powerful and rueful painting.

This man is suffering from a mental illness.

Théodore Géricault was a painter of French Romanticism. This painting was created as part of a series of portraits (which were never exhibited during his lifetime) of patients in an asylum, around 1822.

It’s a touching and empathetic painting - his small cap, hospital tag, v. gaunt cheeks, and an anxious & distressed look.

✲

Laura Cumming, in her review “The week in art: Goya to Impressionism; Linder: Danger Came Smiling – review” (Guardian, Feb 2025), wrote an eloquent encomium about this painting which I enjoyed reading:

There are not many portraits you wait all your adult life to see, but so it is with A Man Suffering from Delusions of Military Rank, painted by Théodore Géricault some time after The Raft of the Medusa in 1819. This shattering image of a man with no name is in Britain for the first time, loaned by a small Swiss museum a dozen miles outside Zurich.

To see it with your own eyes is to have a sense of who this man might really be, whether the title seems right, and why Géricault painted him in the first place: all of them unresolved mysteries.

The man is gaunt and elderly and sunk in anxiety, or suspicion. He looks away from us towards some other world. He is dressed – or dressed up, perhaps by somebody else? – in white shirt, black gilet and cloth sash over one shoulder. Around his neck hangs what looks to modern eyes like a dog tag, numbered 121, and on his head is a tattered hat with red piping and ```