Sex scandal behind Brideshead Revisited and Canberra features!Paula Byrne, in the UK Times, provides an extensive article from her new book which uncovers the sex scandal behind Evelyn Waugh's novel. Extracts include:
"Lord Beauchamp’s homosexuality had been an open secret for years at a certain exalted level of society. He had a weakness for sex with his male servants, which had not abated since he married Lady Lettice Grosvenor, sister of the Duke of Westminster... His proclivities were reasonably well known, even to his political opponents. But it was not thought gentlemanly to make them a subject for public attack. Although homosexual practices still counted as severe criminal offences, Beauchamp felt confident that he could continue his double life without being exposed.
His downfall came with his increasingly indiscreet conduct. The novelist Hugh Walpole told Virginia Woolf of a visit to “the baths at the Elephant and Castle . . . saw Lord Beauchamp in the act with a boy”. Perhaps the final straw was his behaviour during a tour of Australia in 1930. He took two companions: Robert Bernays, a rising man in the Liberal party, as his secretary and George Roberts, a handsome 19-year-old plucked from the Madresfield estate, as his valet. ..
Eyebrows were raised when it became clear that young Roberts was his lover rather than his servant. Before a visit to Canberra, the hosts told Bernays that Roberts would not be welcome. Bernays reported this in a letter back to his own lover in London, Harold Nicolson. Soon the story was doing the rounds in London society. ........On April 25, 1945 the politician and inveterate gossip Chips Channon wrote in his diary: “I am reading an advance copy of Evelyn Waugh’s new novel Brideshead Revisited. It is obvious that the mis-en-scène is Madresfield, and the hero Hugh Lygon. In fact, all the Beauchamp family figure in it.”
To Channon and everyone else in the know, it was clear that the exiled Lord Marchmain was a version of Boom and Lady Marchmain of the Countess Beauchamp, that the dissolute Sebastian Flyte was Hugh and other Lygon siblings matched other roles.
Coote, one of the Lygon sisters, wrote to Waugh: “I read it once at a furious pace and now more slowly, and like it very much. Sebastian gives me many pangs.”
Extracted from Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead by Paula Byrne to be published by HarperCollins on August 20 at £25."
More here.
The Barack Obama Book Club
Want to read like a president? The Daily Beast has pulled together every book that Obama has been spotted with since the campaign. Find out what’s on his night table.
"The Daily Beast has combed newspaper archives and peeked into Air Force One tote bags to bring you the complete list of the books Obama has been reading-or, well, strategically let on that he is reading-since the beginning of the 2008 campaign. This is the Barack Obama Book Club, and the list shows a predilection for presidential profiles, a weakness for explain-it-all bestsellers, and the occasional hankering for literary fiction." More here.
Unfi nished Graham Greene murder mystery novel discovered
A long lost and unfinished Graham Greene murder mystery, The Empty Chair, has been discovered by a French academic.
The UK Teelgraph reports the "22,000 word novel, written in 1926, was discovered last year by Greene scholar Francois Gallix at the Humanities Center in the University of Texas. The Strand will publish one chapter each in the next five quarterly issues, and the magazine is considering holding a competition to complete the story.
Andrew Gulli, managing editor of The Strand Magazine, said: "Whatever happens, we want to make sure the estate of Graham Greene is happy. If they are interested in finding an author [to finish it] that would be great, if they are interested in a readers' contest, that is also great."
He added:"It does have the ingredients of an Agatha Christie country house murder mystery, but (the story by) Graham Greene has a unique twist to it".
More here.
The Australian Bookseller & Publisher reports that "online bookseller Booktopia has announced that it will soon start rolling out the Novel Vending Idea book-vending machines, with plans to install up to 200 machines in shopping centres, hospitals and hotels within a year. Booktopia's CEO Tony Nash said: ‘this is a huge and exciting step for book retailing in Australia. It gives people even greater access to books twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We are so excited about this venture and we know it will be a success.'
Already successful in the UK, the book-vending kiosks allow the consumer to read all about the books on offer, hear interviews with authors and learn about upcoming new releases from the LCD screen. Booktopia plans to roll-out 200 machines in the next year. Books will range in size and price and will include current bestsellers to bargain books at discounted prices. The first shipment of the vending machines arrives in Sydney in September."
The Lost Art of Reading from the LA Times
"Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves. This is what Conroy was hinting at in his account of adolescence, the way books enlarge us by giving direct access to experiences not our own. In order for this to work, however, we need a certain type of silence, an ability to filter out the noise.
Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.
Here we have my reading problem in a nutshell, for books insist we take the opposite position, that we immerse, slow down. "After September 11," Mona Simpson wrote as part of a 2001 LA Weekly round-table on reading during wartime, "I didn't read books for the news. Books, by their nature, are never new enough." By this, Simpson doesn't mean she stopped reading; instead, at a moment when it felt as if time was on fast forward, she relied on books to pull back from the onslaught, to distance herself from the present as a way of reconnecting with a more elemental sense of who we are." Read more here.
Glob alisation, new technology and economic transformation
In this book chapter Rob Atkinson shows how the ICT revolution, not globalization, is at the heart of the social and economic transformations of the last quarter-century. Atkinson explains that the overwhelming increase in global productivity and prosperity throughout the last several decades can be attributed to technology’s growing importance in the global economy.
Amazon Should Let Kindle Go
According to a piece in Business Week's Techbeat.
"Today, people buy Kindle e-book readers from Amazons Web site. But if the e-commerce giant wants to continue dominating the e-reader category in the future, that needs to change, according to a new report from consultant Forrester Research.
Heres why: Demographics of e-book reader buyers are shifting, as the device starts to enter the mainstream, writes report author Sarah Rotman Epps. In the past, Kindle buyers were mainly comprised of business users, who were mostly male. But future prospects for the devices look completely different, Rotman Epps says. Theyre more likely to be female, less tech optimistic, and they read a lot (on average, 5 books per month) but they buy and borrow books from multiple sources, as opposed to buying lots of books online. The big takeaway is that this could spell trouble for Amazon, if competitors can move in to better serve the later waves of adopters who dont have as strong a relationship with the eCommerce giant.
Basically, unless Amazon makes the Kindle available everywhere at competing, traditional bookstores, for example the devices growth could peter off."
Odd Book Title
Ragnar Benson. Gun Running for Fun and Profit. Boulder Colorado. Paladin Press. 1986.
Debbie Campbell from the National Library reports that WorldCat records the title.