All About Books discussion

Here's week 60 and Scoop by Evelyn Waugh first published in 1938.

from the article:

"Subtitled “a novel about journalists”, Scoop is the supreme novel of the 20th-century English newspaper world, fast, light, entertaining and lethal. Remarkably, it’s a satire revered among successive generations of British hacks, the breed so mercilessly skewered by Waugh, a one-time special correspondent for the Daily Mail. Even in the age of online journalism, with many old practices facing extinction, its insights into the British press remain sharp, pertinent and memorable"
(...)
Scoop was made into a BBC serial in 1972 and also a television film scripted by William Boyd in 1987, starring Denholm Elliott, and directed by Gavin Millar. The fictional newspaper owned by Lord Copper in Scoop has also been the inspiration for the title of Tina Brown’s online American publication, the Daily Beast."

read the article: here

I've only read Brideshead Revisited by him, but I liked it.

I don't know anything about this book, but it was mentioned by Christopher Hitchens in an introduction to Our Man in Havana.

I really liked this -- I think I gave it 4½ stars. No, I just checked and only 4 stars. It is a satire about British colonialism (and journalists in particular) so some people find it not very politically correct by today's standards.

Jenny, you probably wouldn't like it as you don't care for English satire very much.

I think of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene together as they both wrote a variety of styles, including some fairly serious books revolving around God and faith (Brideshead Revisited by Waugh and The Power and the Glory by Greene to mention just 2).

I think that if people liked Greene's Our Man in Havana, they would probably like this as well...