How Evelyn Waugh’s 'cantankerous' Catholicism clashed with America's literary scene at a dinner party in Florence

The conservative Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) paid three visits to Harold Acton in Italy in the 1950s and 1960s. I should like to focus on a literary dinner party, a “social and culinary failure”, that took place in Florence in April 1950, during the first of Waugh’s three visits.

In the spring of that year Acton's amusing novella Prince Isidore had just been published. Waugh, whom Acton had not seen since the War, wrote out of the blue praising the novella (“What a delight Prince Isidore is!”) and inviting himself to stay.