Evelyn Waugh's most celebrated novel is a memory drama about the intense entanglement of the narrator, Charles Ryder, with a great Anglo-Catholic family. Written during World War II, the novel mourns the passing of the aristocratic world Waugh knew in his youth and vividly recalls the sensuous plea-sures denied him by wartime austerities; in so doing it also provides a profound study of the conflict between the demands of religion and the desires of the flesh. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, "Brideshead Revisited" transcends Waugh's familiar satiric exploration of his cast of lords and ladies, Catholics and eccentrics, artists and misfits, revealing him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity. The edition reprinted here contains Waugh's revisions, made in 1959, and his preface to the revised edition.

Jeremy Irons reads Evelyn Waugh's classic tale of love and the loss of innocence. Charles Ryder's friendship with the charming, irrepressible Sebastian Flyte and his equally charming, eccentric family begins when they are both Oxford undergraduates in 1923. Carefree days of drinking champagne and driving in the country soon end, however, as Sebastian's health deteriorates. Questions about mortality and religion are raised, and the radiant tone gives way to a bleak atmosphere of shattered illusion...Moving from the decadence of the Roaring Twenties to the austerity of the Second World War, the novel conjures up a lost age, and is Waugh's most moving, romantic and controversial work. Jeremy Irons starred as Charles Ryder in the acclaimed television production of "Brideshead Revisited", which is now a major motion picture starring Emma Thompson and Michael Gambon.

在线阅读本书 A HANDFUL OF DUST satirizes that stratum of English life where all the characters have money, but lack practically every other credential. Murderously urbane, it depicts the breakup of a marriage in the London gentry, where the errant wife suffers from terminal boredom and becomes enamored of a social parasite and professional lunch-goer. The depravity and polished savagery of these characters offer an opportunity for Waugh's rapier wit and subtly to "show us fear in a handful of dust." "Waugh's technique is relentless and razor-edged...by any standard it is super satire." (Chicago Daily News) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, "Brideshead Revisited" looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.

The Bright Young Things of 1920s Mayfair, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercise their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade, whether it is promiscuity, dancing, cocktail parties or sports cars. A vivid assortment of characters, among them the struggling writer Adam Fenwick-Symes and the glamorous, aristocratic Nina Blount, hunt fast and furiously for ever greater sensations and the hedonistic fulfilment of their desires. Evelyn Waugh's acidly funny and experimental satire shows a new generation emerging in the years after the First World War, revealing the darkness and vulnerability beneath the glittering surface of the high life.