The War That Never Was

Many people claim to have unearthed secrets from the near past. Some of those secrets were never a secret; most are nothing more than conspiracy theories. It was therefore nice to find a book about a secret war that really was kept more or less secret. At the least, for various reasons, it escaped scrutiny so far. 

Kiss Me Chudleigh: The World According To Auberon Waugh

Being offensive is an easy thing to do and something most people are quite good at; doing it intelligently, though, is a literary achievement. Auberon Waugh was a master of this craft and excelled at finding the hornet’s nest where none existed before. 

Brideshead Revisited

With Ben Whishaw as camp as a row of tents and the long shadows of an incomparable TV series putting the movie Brideshead Revisited into the category of been there, seen it, bought the t-shirt, it’s Brideshead Revisited, again, one might say. I revisited it for the third time, being on the wrong (or right) side of forty to remember the TV series from the eighties and to have read the book by Evelyn Waugh.