![]() ![]() Hmmm…Well, no, I’m afraid I don’t see it that way at all. “Scoop, as its title suggests, is a satire not on colonial sideshows, but on the eternal quest for breaking news, the endless competition between the Brute and the Beast.” I’ve even seen those who say that Waugh’s derogatory comments about race aren’t actually his but those of the journalists he is satirising. Many of the critics I’ve read, and who place great value on the book, seem to side-step this particular elephant in the room and justify it by focussing on the dissection of the journalists’ ‘art’ and brushing off the racism as a side issue. “Subtitled “a novel about journalists”, Scoop is the supreme novel of the 20th-century English newspaper world, fast, light, entertaining and lethal.”īut this is also Evelyn Waugh and alongside his excoriating satire of journalistic values and practices you also get a great chunk of gratuitous racism. ![]() Literary critic, Robert McCrum included Waugh’s 1938 satire in his list of the 100 best novels and in so doing made this pretty unequivocal claim for it: ![]()
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