Temporarily at least, the ODNB life of Martin Cyril D'Arcy is available free on the OUP website. He was the Jesuit at Farm Street who instructed Evelyn Waugh, among many others.

A couple of extracts:

Complementary with this ideal of a Jesuit contribution to English Christian humanism was an attachment to an English Catholic past, hazily and ( Read more... )

... of the Mass in which the Pope beatified John Henry Newman?

Or, for that matter, what would Nicola - or Patrick, or any of the others - have thought?

I should add that I'm asking this as an interested outsider who watched most of it and is eagerly awaiting discussion, but probably doesn't know enough to be able to actually contribute much.

I have been speculating.  What would be the results of Edwin finding a Marlow who died for the Protestant faith?  I suspect it would be under Queen Mary, but that would mean that there must have been a farm journal filed out of order, as I believe that in RAH Nick says that he's up to the 1670s ( Read more... )

Patrick's romantic life provides a lot of scope for speculation.  The canon only provides Ginty, Claudie, and Nicola.  I'll state up front that, of the three, Nicola is obviously the best match, in my opinion.  Claudie is a non-starter, and unless Ginty gets a massive dose of maturity or Patrick goes off the deep end, we can rule Ginty out.

On the ( Read more... )

1. Nick and Lawrie are still on the Junior netball team, even though so much of the switch in EofT was because Nick would never again have the chance to do this because they'd be too old ( Read more... )

Has anybody noticed a curious thing about the books, that while the Marlows themselves are spectacularly fecund, just about every other major character - Patrick, Tim, Miranda, Esther….is an only child?

I’ve been wondering for a bit if this is more than coincidence….it seems to me that AF (who is on record as saying she began the Marlow stories ( Read more... )

  ( Read more... )

Can you help?

1. In Peter's Room, Peter, Rowan and Karen are in the bathroom. Peter draws 'an X on the surface of the water in the basin to avert a quarrel'. What does this mean?

2. In Run Away Home, during all the hoo-ha about Nick borrowing Ann's bike to go to Mass at the Merrick's, Rowan says, "I ought to warn you that when old Ramsay [I ( Read more... )

Cross posted from my own journal ( Read more... )

Inquiring minds want to know. I was rereading Run Away Home, and I have a few religious-related questions. I'm an atheist, albeit with a vaguely Protestant background, and I don't understand some of the terms. Rowan says that when Ramsay does his duty by the ASB, Mrs Marlow goes to Evensong instead of Matins. So ( Read more... )