The wrong label that stuck

A young writer produced a brilliant novel that attacked religious fundamentalism, rubbished the press, found politics corrupt and the members of the British upper class shallow and boring. The date was 1930 when the 27-year-old Evelyn Waugh published Vile Bodies.

Sixteen years later Kingsley Amis read Brideshead Revisited at St John’s College, Oxford and sent quotations to Philip Larkin with a ‘burp’ printed after what he thought was every precious line.