Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead
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A terrifically engaging and original biography about one of England’s greatest novelists, and the glamorous, eccentric, debauched and ultimately tragic family that provided him with the most significant friendships of his life and inspired his masterpiece, ‘Brideshead Revisited’.Evelyn Waugh was already famous when ‘Brideshead Revisited’ was published in 1945. Written at the height of the war, the novel was, he admitted, of no ‘immediate propaganda value’. Instead, it was the story of a household, a family and a journey of religious faith – an elegy, in many ways, for a vanishing world and a testimony to a family he had fallen in love with a decade earlier.The Lygons of Madresfield were every bit as glamorous, eccentric and compelling as their counterparts in ‘Brideshead Revisited’. In this engrossing biography, Paula Byrne takes an innovative approach to her subject, setting out to capture Waugh through those friendships that mattered most to him. Far from the snobbish misanthropist of popular caricature, she uncovers a man as loving and complex as the family that inspired him – a family deeply traumatised when their father was revealed as a homosexual and forced to flee the country.This brilliantly original biography unlocks for the first time the extent to which Waugh’s great novel encoded and transformed his own experiences. In so doing, it illuminates the loves and obsessions that shaped his life, and brings us inevitably to a secret that dared not speak its name.
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Paula Byrne. Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead
PAULA BYRNE. Mad World. Evelyn Waugh and the. Secrets of Brideshead
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Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1 A Tale of Two Childhoods
CHAPTER 2 Lancing versus Eton
CHAPTER 3 Oxford: ‘… her secret none can utter’
CHAPTER 4 The Scarlet Woman
CHAPTER 5 In the Balance
CHAPTER 6 The Lygon Heritage
CHAPTER 7 Untoward Incidents
CHAPTER 8 Bright Young Things
CHAPTER 9 The Busting of Boom
CHAPTER 10 Madresfield Visited
CHAPTER 11 The Beauchamp Belles
CHAPTER 12 Christmas at Mad
CHAPTER 13 An Encounter in Rome
CHAPTER 14 Up the Amazon
CHAPTER 15 A Gothic Man
CHAPTER 16 Fiasco in the Arctic
CHAPTER 17 Ladies and Lapdogs
CHAPTER 18 A Year of Departures
CHAPTER 19 Three Weddings and a Funeral
CHAPTER 20 Waugh’s War
CHAPTER 21 The Door to Brideshead
CHAPTER 22 Brideshead Unlocked
If you enjoyed Mad World, check out these other great Paula Byrne titles
P.S. Ideas, interviews & features …
About the Author
About the Book
Read On
CODA ‘Laughter and the Love of Friends’
SOURCES
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PRAISE
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Отрывок из книги
Cover
Title Page
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Evelyn loved his prep school and, looking back, realised how lucky he was: ‘When I read the accounts of my contemporaries of the enormities enacted at their preparatory school both by masters and boys, I admit that Heath Mount ‘‘had a good tone’’’ – though it could not be denied that some of the masters ‘liked little boys too little and some too much’. There was a tendency to fondle the boys ‘in a manner just short of indecency, smacking us and pulling our hair in a manner well short of cruelty’. Evelyn himself was capable of bullying tendencies. He picked on a small and beautiful boy called Cecil Beaton: ‘the tears on his long eyelashes used to provoke the sadism of youth’.
Even at a tender age, Evelyn was attracted to seemingly glamorous and sophisticated friends. ‘I was early drawn to panache,’ he declared, recalling the sangfroid and the louche lifestyle of a little rich boy whose nanny would stand in attendance at football games in order to refresh him with lemon squash from a flask. At the cinema (which Evelyn adored), the rich boy regaled his lowly friend with filthy schoolboy jokes and lurid tales of the private lives of actresses. In return, Evelyn, who was going through a pious phase, tried to interest his friend in Anglo-Catholicism. High Church rituals had captivated him at the age of eleven. His friend, however, had more worldly things on his mind.
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