Last week we lingered at Oxford — that season of innocence when friendship, laughter, and beauty seemed sufficient for a lifetime. This week, Evelyn Waugh moves us forward, gently but decisively, into Stage III — Brideshead & First Love. Oxford was a garden of youth. Brideshead is something else entirely. Here, Charles Ryder encounters beauty on a larger scale — not merely aesthetic pleasure, but a place that awakens longing, attachment, and a sense of destiny. Long be

First published in 1945, Brideshead Revisited is the most explicitly Christian novel by Evelyn Waugh, and one of the great religious novels of the twentieth century. Written at the end of World War II, it is a work of remembrance—of youth, of England, of beauty—but more deeply, of grace.