Satire Day

Believe it or not, there is a World Satire Day (or rather World Day of Satire), inaugurated in Nigeria in 2019 and, I think it's fair to say, not very widely observed. Its date, November 9th, seems to have been chosen for no particular reason. Today, October 28th, would be a much better candidate, as it is both the anniversary of the publication of Gulliver's Travels and the birthday of Evelyn Waugh (born 1903), who in my opinion was at his very best in his early satires – Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust and (my own favourite) Scoop. Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver was published on this day 200 years ago. I remember the thrill of reading it in full for the first time, and realising that this was something very different from the sanitised tale I'd known in my childhood, and that Lilliput and Brobdingnag were the least of it. Johnson famously said of the Travels that 'When once you have thought of…