Word: brideshead
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...Brideshead Revisited is a by-product of Waugh's military career. He wrote the 351-page novel while nursing a foot broken in a parachute jump. To many U.S. readers this book will be their first exposure to one of the wittiest, most corrosively mocking and violently serious minds now writing English prose-a mind whose career is almost as exciting as the books it has produced...
...Novel. Brideshead Revisited is a tragicomedy of Britain between World Wars I & II. Like its author's life, it opens with mockery, ends in religious dedication. Half of it glitters with wit, the other half is rigorously solemn. Some of the writing matches Waugh's best (and there is little better); some of it is equal to his worst (sample: ". . . at sunset I took formal possession of her as her lover. ... On the rough water ... I was made free of her narrow loins."). Those who believe that Author Waugh makes real sense only when he is writing apparent...
...hero of Brideshead Revisited is Charles Ryder, an architectural painter. When young Charles became an Oxford undergraduate in the golden age (circa 1921), life still flowed unruffled in Oxford...
Sebastian's older brother, Lord Brideshead, was an avid collector of matchboxes. Sebastian's sister, Julia, was like a "Renaissance tragedy. . . . Dogs and children love her . . . my dear, she's a fiend. . . . There ought to be an Inquisition especially set up to burn...
...gave her a tortoise with her initials set in diamonds on its shell. He was not surprised when his good friend Sebastian took to drinking on the sly. "My dear, such a sot," said Anthony Blanche. "Sip sip, sip like a dowager, all day." But when Ryder visited Brideshead, the magnificent family mansion, he was astonished to find that "religion predominated in the house," that the family diversified its sins with daily mass and rosaries...