Life & Letters

Allan Massies dips into Brideshead Revisited

Having just read something about the new film of Brideshead Revisited, I picked up the novel, opened it at random, and then, some two hours later, a good part of my working evening was gone. I suppose it is now Waugh’s most popular novel — his Pride and Prejudice as it were — but, when first published, ‘it lost me’, he wrote in the introduction to the revised 1960 edition, ‘such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries and’ — perhaps worse? — ‘led me into an unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers’.