I returned from the barber seconds ago and am now about to go up the spout, but I just received this e-mail from a reader apropos of the Evelyn Waugh quotation-from-memory I posted at the end of yesterday’s Consumables, and wanted to pass it on to you before I retire to my Secure Undisclosed Location:
I may be late on this, but here’s the passage in Evelyn Waugh’s diaries that you asked about on your blog the other day. It’s the entry for Sunday 17 November 1946 (p. 663 in the English edition). A houseguest had departed, and Waugh wrote, “What an enormous, uncovenanted blessing to have kept Henry James for middle age and to turn, as the door shuts behind the departing guest, to a first reading of ‘Portrait of a Lady.’ “
Even better. Many thanks. Ta-ta for now.