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. Basil] is a man for whom there will be no place in the coming workers’ state; and yet, thought Ambrose, I hunger for his company. It is a curious thing, he thought, that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilised taste. Nanny told me of a Heaven that was full of angels playing harps; the communists tell me of an earth full of leisure and contented factory hands. I don’t see Basil getting past the gate of either” (69-70).

Poppet Green is a feather-brained ‘artist’ who follows whatever the latest fad happens to be – which in 1939 was surrealism. Her subjects are: 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:Freddy: “If there’d been more like us and fewer like Basil there’d never have been a war. You can’t blame Ribbentrop for thinking us decadent when he saw people like Basil about. I don’t suppose they’ll have much use for him in the Army. He’s thirty-six. He might get some sort of job connected with censorship. He seems to know a lot of languages.”

velyn Waugh’s imagination still fondly lingers in the London of Aldous Huxley, that decadent town of charmingly useless and articulately

by Evelyn Waugh

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. For him there was no ‘they’. England was at war; he, Alastair Trumpington was at war. It was not the business of any politician to tell him when or how he should fight. But he could not put this into words A later film adaptation of Vile Bodies by Steven Fry was released in 2003 under the title Bright Young Things. The IMDB also records a 1939 BBC TV series called Table d’Hote in which one episode was entitled “Doubting Hall”. The information on this is sketchy but several characters listed also appear in Vile Bodies. There was also a stage version of that novel in the early 1930s which Waugh mentions. But this 1970 BBC TV production may be the only film version of Put Out More Flags ever made. Put Out More Flags, the sixth novel by Evelyn Waugh, was first published by Chapman and Hall in 1942. The title comes from the saying of an anonymous Chinese sage, quoted and translated by Lin Yutang in The Importance of Living (1937):