Word: brideshead
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Sharp Look. In his crisply written trilogy, Waugh seems to be turning back from the mannered romanticism of Brideshead Revisited. But this is not the exuberant young cynic of Decline and Fall, Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust; sophistication has been supplanted by weary wisdom, not-so-innocent merriment by middle-aged melancholy. The upperclass war the trilogy chronicles-in bars and blackouts, billets and beds-will for many bear only a limited resemblance to any real war they knew or imagined. Its dialogue is so Britishly British that it is bound to set some New World teeth...
...some of his novels Waugh has got around his problem by succumbing wholly either to ferocity (as in The Loved One) or heartburn (as in A Handful of Dust). More often, he has kept his anger uppermost and merely hinted at a grumpy sympathy with mankind. But in Brideshead Revisited (TIME, Jan. 7, 1946), he made his first major effort to express fully both sides of his divided self-to give poison only where poison was due, to cool boiling oil with holy water...
...Waugh gave evidence in his one great book "Brideshead Revisited" that he did have a brain underneath that fun-and-games exterior. It was a serious study, streaked through with a deeper humor, of much the same sort of people he had had such fun with in his earlier books. Waugh had come of age, one tought...
Several times in his writing life-in his study of Jesuit Edmund Campion, in Brideshead Revisited, and now in Helena -Author Waugh has tried to clear the satiric brambles out of his literary field, and to plant in their stead the herb of grace. He has had no very impressive crop so far, but most Waugh readers don't mind. They can be pretty sure another season will bring forth a bucketful of raspberries on the old Waugh briers...
...according to Novelist Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited, the smart Oxford undergraduate ate plovers' eggs, read T. S. Eliot, drove a Morris-Cowley two-seater, might even carry a pet Teddy bear around with...