Second paragraph of third chapter:

I had started the term with my battels paid and over a hundred pounds in hand. All that had gone, and not a penny paid out where I could get credit. There had been no reason for it, no great pleasure unattainable else: it had gone in ducks and drakes. Sebastian used to tease me – ‘You spend money like a bookie’ – but all of it went on and with him. His own finances were perpetually, vaguely distressed. ‘It’s all done by lawyers,’ he said helplessly, ‘and I suppose they embezzle a lot. Anyway, I never seem to get much. Of course, mummy would give me anything I asked for.’

I had read this many years ago, appropriately enough borrowed from the library at Fisher House, the Catholic Chaplaincy at Cambridge University, where I spent a lot of time as an undergraduate. Fisher House in the late 1980s was still shaking off the traumas of twenty years before, when the veteran chaplain Monsignor Gilbey was displaced after three decades.

There were ongoing tensions between the posh and the less posh, and between traditional Latin vs folk Mass worshippers, two cleavages which had substantial but not 100% overlap, and where being Irish I was able to flit around the boundary. Once or twice a year, the octogenarian Monsignor Gilbey would sweep in to visit and celebrate Mass the old way, exciting the acolytes. There was palpable nostalgia for the days that Waugh writes about in Brideshead Revisited and elsewhere.

Indeed, it’s a little shocking to realise that this 1946 novel was only half as old in 1986 as it is now in 2026. I loved it then, and I loved it on rereading. Sure, it’s about a bunch of privileged upper-class kids, and sure, the author is being didactic about Catholicism; but the interpersonal dynamics are fascinating and the dialogue really cracks along. Just to pick one minor character, the narrator’s father, stunningly and apparently unintentionally rude in every conversation:

‘So you’re being divorced,’ said my father. ‘Isn’t that rather unnecessary, after you’ve been happy together all these years?’
‘We weren’t particularly happy, you know.’
‘Weren’t you? Were you not? I distinctly remember last Christmas seeing you together and thinking how happy you looked, and wondering why.’

It’s that ‘wondering why’ that makes it a classic line, and I hope John Gielgud got to say it in the TV version. (I have not checked.)

My only complaint is that we end rather weakly, with Sebastian disappearing off stage and Charles unable to get it together with his sister Julia at the point when it all seemed possible. But sometimes life doesn’t offer completely satisfactory endings, and it’s the author’s choice to tell us rather than show us what happens to Sebastian. A return visit that did not disappoint me. You can get Brideshead Revisited here.

This was my top unread book acquired last year, my top unread non-genre fiction book, and my top book not yet reviewed here. Next on all three piles is Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy.