But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.” Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is an absorbing, beautifully written […]

“‘Sent down for indecent behaviour, eh?’ said Paul Pennyfeather’s guardian.” This is Evelyn Waugh’s first real novel, and is a revision of an earlier novel he was working on. It was published in 1928, and if you’ve only read something like Brideshead Revisited or to some extend Men at Arms (or the whole of the Sword of Honour trilogy) it’s easy to mistake the humor and irony of those more serious novels for the primary tone of much of Waugh’s fiction. Several of his books […]