Mad World Evelyn Waugh And The Secrets Of Brideshead Text Only

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’.

"A terrifically engaging and original biography of Evelyn Waugh and the family that provided him with the most significant friendships of his life and inspired his masterpiece, BRIDESHEAD REVISITED"--Provided by publisher.

This is a comprehensive and detailed encyclopedia for readers of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, one of the most popular and critically acclaimed novels of the twentieth century. It contains 175 entries on all aspects of the novel, covering such topics as the novel's main characters; cultural, literary, and political references; themes; organization; homosexuality; the novel's critical reception; and its film adaptions. It also pays particular attention to the importance of Catholicism in the story, discussing such subjects as sin, good and evil, divine grace, time, art, and love. A helpful list of recommended readings is included.

Arguing against the critical commonplace that Evelyn Waugh’s post-war fiction represents a decline in his powers as a writer, D. Marcel DeCoste offers detailed analyses of Waugh's major works from Brideshead Revisited to Unconditional Surrender. Rather than representing an ill-advised departure from his true calling as an iconoclastic satirist, DeCoste suggests, these novels form a cohesive, artful whole precisely as they explore the extent to which the writer’s and the Catholic’s vocations can coincide. For all their generic and stylistic diversity, these novels pursue a new, sustained exploration of Waugh’s art and faith both. As DeCoste shows, Waugh offers in his later works an under-remarked meditation on the dangers of a too-avid devotion to art in the context of modern secularism, forging in the second half of his career a literary achievement that both narrates and enacts a contrary, and Catholic, literary vocation.

'Oliver Messel' is a lavishly illustrated book with many never-before-seen photographs offering a privileged view of the life and work of a design master of the 20th century.

Tells the story of the difficult loves of insular Englishman Charles Ryder, and his peculiarly intense relationship with the wealthy but dysfunctional family that inhabited Brideshead. While at Oxford, Charles Ryder meets boyish, flamboyant Sebastian Flyte, who introduces Charles to a charmed and glamorous way of life that continues until Sebastian's health deteriorates.

Following the death of a friend, British poet and pets' mortician Dennis Barlow finds himself entering the artificial Hollywood paradise of the Whispering Glades Memorial Park. Within its golden gates, death, American-style, is wrapped up and sold like a package holiday. There, Dennis enters the fragile and bizarre world of Aimée, the naïve Californian corpse beautician, and Mr Joyboy, the master of the embalmer's art... A dark and savage satire on the Anglo-American cultural divide, "The Loved One" depicts a world where love, reputation and death cost a very great deal.