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Chapter 5 - Evelyn Waugh and the ends of minority culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Marina MacKay
Marina MacKay
Affiliation:
Washington University, St Louis
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Summary

We must forego our freedom to be free. And if proof were needed that we understand this situation, witness the speed with which Parliament on our behalf lately granted the Government full powers of control over all persons and all property … Not so much ‘Socialism in our time’, a Labour Member wittily observed, as ‘Socialism in no time’.

‘Magna Carta, 1215–1940’, The Listener, 13 June 1940.

What changes of taste this war, and the reactions following it, may produce, no one can foresee. But at least it can hardly give rise to arts unintelligible outside a Bloomsbury drawing-room, and completely at variance with those stoic virtues which the whole nation is now called upon to practise.

‘Eclipse of the Highbrow’, The Times, 25 March 1941.

The Emergency Powers (Defence) Act passed in May 1940 made Britain a totalitarian state. ‘Today, on your behalf’, Clement Attlee began his broadcast to the nation, ‘Parliament has given to the Government full power to control all persons and property. There is no distinction between rich and poor, between worker and employer; between man and woman; the services and property of all must be at the disposal of the Government for the common task’.

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Modernism and World War II , pp. 118 - 141
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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