Brideshead Revisited

Chosen by James Holland

Although only part of Evelyn Waugh’s novel is set during the Second World War, it was written between December 1943 and June 1944, while the author was recovering from a parachute accident. Waugh served in the army during the conflict, including a stint with the Commandos, with whom he saw action at the battle of Crete in 1941.

Despite his reputation as a brilliant comic novelist, Brideshead is a wistful and rather mournful piece, narrated by Charles Ryder, an artist. One night during the war, Ryder arrives at a new army camp, only to discover that he has come to the grounds of a country house he knows very well: Brideshead, the home of the aristocratic Flyte family. This prompts him to reflect on his relationship with the family – first with Sebastian, the eccentric and tragic son; then Sebastian’s sister Julia, with whom Charles had an intense affair in the years leading up to the war.

Brideshead has been my favourite book since I first read it as a teenager – one that includes a brilliant depiction of Britain’s wartime army, in which civilian conscripts forced into the strict parameters of army life make for awkward and ill-fitting bedfellows.

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Waugh gives us a brilliant depiction of the wartime army James Holland