Hello, welcome to the Editor's Desk.

This is the podcast where we take a closer look at the essays and articles in the latest print issue of First Things magazine.

I'm Rusty Reno on the editor of First Things Magazine, and I'm here with you today at the editor's desk.

Well, I'm very delighted today to welcome Jaspreet Singh Bopare to the podcast, and we're

going to talk about his essay, Waugh, that is to say, Evelyn Waugh, against the Fogies from the August, September 2025 issue of First Things magazine.

Welcome to the podcast, Jess Breed.

Thank you very much for having me. It's a great pleasure to be here.

Well, you know, Evelyn Waugh is for for readers of first things, you know, we're a religious magazine with,

I always tell people we're not a Catholic magazine, but, or no, we're not merely a Catholic

magazine. We do Protestant and Jewish authors and topics, but we certainly are very Catholic heavy, heavy.

And so, Evelyn Waugh is well known to our readership.

But in this essay, you take up a tussle between Waugh and Hugh Trevor Roper, about whom I would guess most of our listeners

do not know.

So tell us a little bit about even what we know, the great novelist, Bryce has revisited,

but tell us who Hugh Trevor Roper was. So Hugh Trevor Roper is one of the most

famous historians, at least in England of the 20th century. He's one of the most famous, and yet he

didn't write a great deal of history. He's much better known for these long, somewhat, these long historical essays,

which are extremely provocative. Some people think that he, some people think that his literary,

his literary attainments were considerable. I don't. I find his style a little bit,

I find his style a little bit on the pompous side. So he was born, he was born around a decade

after evil in war. And so he was still alive in the late 1990s. But he was essentially a figure of the, he was essentially a figure of the post-war

period. So he was, he went to Oxford, initially studied classics, and then in the middle

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