Put Out More Flags (Penguin Modern Classics)

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A pansy. An old queen. A habit of dress, a tone of voice, an elegant, humorous deportment that had been admired and imitated, a swift, epicene felicity of wit, the art of dazzling and confusing those he despised - these had been his; and now they were the current exchange of comedians; there were only a few restaurants, now, which he frequent without fear of ridicule, and there he was surrounded, as though by distorting mirrors, with gross reflections and caricatures of himself. But the owners of the country piles must now 'do their bit' and either have the local militia camped on their lawns with their sprawling tented villages, and the officers made welcome in their drawing rooms, or take in children evacuees despatched from Birmingham and billeted upon them by the local authorities. Meanwhile their husbands seek to use the wheels of patronage and secure an easy wartime occupation. But the joys of Put Out More Flags do not reside entirely in its major characters, male and female, drawn at full length; for each of these, there are a dozen vignettes of people and places, sketched, it would seem, in a

Evelyn Waugh's father Arthur was a noted editor and publisher. His only sibling Alec also became a writer of note. In fact, his book “The Loom of Youth” (1917) a novel about his old boarding school Sherborne caused Evelyn to be expelled from there and placed at Lancing College. He said of his time there, “…the whole of English education when I was brought up was to produce prose writers; it was all we were taught, really.” He went on to Hertford College, Oxford, where he read History. When asked if he took up any sports there he quipped, “I drank for Hertford.” Alastair Trumpington endures the petty bureaucracy of life in the ranks. Ambrose Silk is working at the Ministry of Information, worried that even fellow-travellers might be at risk. Angela Lyne has shut down her home and is enduring a lonely existence in a Grosvenor Square flat. Alastair Trumpington is involved in absurd training exercises. Basil is frivolous, mischievous and incorrigible. His antics are also indulged and even grudgingly admired by his closest friends and connections. Sir Joseph Mainwaring believes all the myths and rumours circulating about the war. Alastair is posted to coastal defence and wishes for more excitement. Rampole reads ‘light fiction’ in prison, and Basil joins a special service unit.Ambrose Silk is a more subtle and nuanced example of fashion. He is a dandy and an aesthete who has been a communist sympathiser – a fellow traveller in the jargon of the time. Waugh pokes fun at him on two fronts. He is terrified of what might happen to him if the Germans invade Britain – since he is aware that the Nazis have persecuted left sympathisers. And more comically, he is writing a memoir Monument to a Spartan which describes his love for Hans, a German brown shirt fascist youth. They were both silent, and in the silence Angela knew, by an intuition which defied any possible doubt, exactly what her maid was thinking. She was thinking, “Supposing Mr. Seal gets himself killed. Best thing really for all concerned.” Basil’s attempts at war heroism are far less successful than his money-making endeavors. When he flunks an interview for a privileged position in the army (“arranged” by his mother begging a favor of a prominent government official), Basil tries to interest the Ministry of Information into the strategic wisdom of annexing Liberia. When that too fails, he finagles a job in the War Office. But the job is without promise, so Basil executes a plan to persuade a close friend to write material resembling German propaganda—and then betrays his friend to the authorities. However, guilt then compels Basil to effect his friend’s escape to Ireland. Seeking aphorisms, I read this book. Learning that the following came from this work, I suspected there must be more: It is a curious thing, he thought, that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.

urn:lcp:putoutmoreflags0000waug_n3x5:epub:ce8a7dd9-b5ef-42d3-9ce6-5c65e943bea8 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier putoutmoreflags0000waug_n3x5 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2q6wj24336 Invoice 1652 Isbn 9780241261699 Whilst being largely a farcical comedy, it also contains interesting elements of well-observed social history – particularly the decline of the English upper class, the institutions of government, and ideological movements of the period in what we would now call ‘culture wars’.For servants, the pay would be better working in a manufacturing industry, but they would also have more personal liberty and be free of the patronising and authoritarian discipline imposed by traditional upper-class employers. They would be free of the stifling deference required by the landed gentry who for generations had regarded themselves as superior beings. Up to and including a single date flag: the data series contains consecutive “ 1”s that end once a single date is reached. All other cells contain zero. Used to identify periods running up to and including a single event e.g. pre-construction period end flag . Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-1-g862e Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.15 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000587 Openlibrary_edition In 1928 he married Evelyn Gardiner. She proved unfaithful, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1930. Waugh would derive parts of “A Handful of Dust” from this unhappy time. His second marriage to Audrey Herbert lasted the rest of his life and begat seven children. It was during this time that he converted to Catholicism.

With the outbreak of WWII, the opportunistic Basil states his objective early on: "I want to be one of those people one heard about in 1919: the hard-faced men who did well out of the war." In 1924 Waugh left Oxford without taking his degree. After inglorious stints as a school teacher (he was dismissed for trying to seduce a school matron and/or inebriation), an apprentice cabinet maker and journalist, he wrote and had published his first novel, “Decline and Fall” in 1928.Angela's husband visits her with their child before embarking with the ill-equipped and ill-organised British forces for Norway, where he dies in combat. For a projected literary magazine, Ambrose Silk writes about his lost love, a Brownshirt named Hans who is now in a Nazi concentration camp. Basil persuades him to leave out Hans' fate, so that the article appears to praise the SA. He then shows it to his boss as evidence of a cell of allegedly dangerous fascists. The publisher is jailed, but Ambrose escapes to neutral Ireland, disguised as a Jesuit priest. Basil takes over his luxurious flat and adds to it Susie, his boss's luscious secretary. Cedric Lyne goes to see his estranged wife before his departure for Norway. Basil plans to reveal Poppet and Ambrose as communist sympathisers. Cedric is met by a shambolic embarkation of troops at the port. They whirl around trying not to get their fingers burnt, but eventually the war calls out to them, and even the reprobate Basil Seal volunteers for a commando posting. What starts out as a comedy ends up with several characters rolling up their sleeves and deciding that they better get along with it. Every forecast model we build in F1F9 has a Time sheet: a worksheet dedicated to important dates e.g. when the model starts, when the model ends, when the project starts , when the project ends, when the project moves from one phase to another. The Time sheet is a foundation sheet: bringing together core information that answer s the question “when do things happen?”. Through his unsavory vision, we see how England rapidly converted from the drawing-room to the battlefield in the course of a year. Basil resists finding a war job until it's absolutely necessary, and watches his friends and acquaintances join forces with the war effort. Waugh wrote this book in real time; it came out in 1942, so the voices and attitudes are those of the upper class that were part of his daily round. We see the language change from society shorthand to military doublespeak, the outfits from tea gowns to fatigues, and the attitudes from conversation to action.