Put Out More Flags (Penguin Modern Classics)

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The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. It is generally and uncritically accepted these days that A Handful of Dust (1934) was the greatest of Evelyn Waugh's novels, fulfilling the early promise of Decline and Fall (1928), and that his career as a writer gradually ran downhill from there. There is some truth to this, but it falsifies the value of a writer whose creative life, unlike that of so many twentieth-century writers, possessed not only a first act but a second and third as well. The first act, whose theme was a dazzling, sardonic irreverence toward the crumbling Empire between the wars, came to an end in 1942; the second, more dourly preoccupied with the Second War and its fatal consequences for the English upper class -- with the striking, farcical exception of The Loved One (1948) -- ended with the completion of The Sword of Honour trilogy in 1962; the third, short and glorious, overlapped the second, including the brilliant Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) and the unfinished autobiography, A Little Learning (1964).

IMDB recently updated the archival information in its database relating to two little-known BBC TV adaptations of Waugh’s works from 1970. These are Vile Bodies and Put Out More Flags. Both were 90-minute productions on BBC2, but some archival information is still incomplete. In between failed attempts at money-making and war heroism, Basil’s dalliances include amorous flirtations with a wealthy, lonely woman, estranged from her husband, and a frivolous Bohemian artist. In one particularly dastardly deed, he borrows money from the former woman to indulge the latter. What were the “three rich women” thinking about? The following passages are revealing. First, an exchange between Basil’s sister Barbara Sothill and her husband Freddy, a serving officer: Put Out More Flags, an earlier war novel, opens in the autumn of 1939 and all takes place during the twelve months of the war. It was published in 1942.So what? It means that the financial modellling can distinguish between relevant data (that multiplied by “1”) and irrelevant data (that multiplied by “0”) . Useful if your core data runs beyond the period of the financial model. Or if you wish to flex the period of the financial model: change the end date and all your flags update accordingly.

Basil is frivolous, mischievous and incorrigible. His antics are also indulged and even grudgingly admired by his closest friends and connections. Chapter II. Basil goes to stay with his sister at Malfrey, where three delinquent evacuee children are forced onto them. Basil pretends to be a billeting officer and dumps the children onto a retired couple in their beautiful old home. When a few days later they are at their wits end, Basil charges the couple money to take the children elsewhere. Like in all of Waugh’s novels, we get a perfect glimpse into the decayed social structure of the pseudo-intellectuals (i.e., Marxists) in Britain. The novel is not necessarily happy, few of Waugh’s are, but its wit is razor sharp. For reasons one can’t fathom, Basil is often in the company of the avant-garde Marxists. He tells one surrealist painter who is frightened by the war, “You know I should have thought an air raid was just the thing for a surrealiste; it ought to give you plenty of compositions--limbs and things lying about in odd places you know” (Waugh 32).

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Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. Green cloth. Spine faded, as usual, else a nice clean copy. Encuadernación de tapa blanda. Condition: Excelente. 1ª Edición. (Literatura inglesa. Novela). Buenos Aires, Editorial Sudamericana, 1947. Col. Horizonte. Cubiertas originales en rústica. Traducción de Horacio Laurora. 356 p. 2 h. 8º menor. Intonso. Excelente ejemplar. Primera edición en castellano. First spanish edition of *Put out more flags* (1942). 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. They were great supporters of the republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, but as soon as Britain was under threat they emigrated to the United States. This is a satirical dig at Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden who did exactly that in 1939.