Word: brideshead
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...also never too late to read or reread Waugh. His vitality, matchless craftsmanship, audacious imagination and stinging perceptions ("She wore the livery of the highest fashion, but as one who dressed to inform rather than to attract") have not dated. Like Charles Ryder, the painter hero of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh focused "the frankly traditional battery of his elegance and erudition on the maelstrom of barbarism...
...before he had been allowed to enjoy it. His bitterness knew no limits, and dominated his personal relationships and gave the underlying animus to his writing. In books, as a rule, he caught the dying glow of the upper classes in the softening mirror of decent, fair-minded characters. Brideshead Revisited, his greatest novel, is elegiac, but not vindictive. Outside of fiction, though, Waugh was quick to place the blame where he thought it belonged...
Meanwhile Waugh had published his World War II trilogy, Sword of Honour, which Sykes thinks is his best work. The trilogy has, I think, much of value in it, and Waugh's parody of his own Brideshead Revisited is among the funniest passages he ever wrote. But on the whole Sykes doesn't make his judgment stick. Waugh was not the man to interpret an event like the Second World War, and under the stress his humor coarsens and his elegiac tone become saccharine...
Waugh was deepened by his religion, and the deepening was steeply apparent in Brideshead Revisited (1945), a lyric celebration of Catholicism that alternates pious puling with the loveliest cadences he ever came upon. He was broadened by the war, and the broadening was vigorously displayed in his masterpiece, a 972-page trilogy (Men at Anns, Officers and Gentlemen, The End of the Battle) which is now widely considered the best British novel of World War II. In the trilogy Waugh creates in Apthorpe his greatest comic character, a Falstaff as funny, as tragic, as human as the huge original...
...Lord Sebastian Flyte, in Brideshead Revisited >Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh is a Tivian with a lifelong and unswerving Hatred of the 20th century's industrialized, democratized ways. From his first irrespressibly comic, murderously sar-comic novels (Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies), most of Waugh's books have vad as their real subject the loss of a golden age. Looking back, the Oxford Vlnd Mayfair targets Waugh satirized in Viene '20s and '30s have largely vanished, Baking with them half the early novels' Viumor but leaving the rage intact. After World War II he suddenly...