Mad World

Product Description

A terrifically engaging & original biography about one of Englands greatest novelists & the glamorous eccentric debauched & ultimately tragic family that provided him with the most significant friendships of his life & 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 & a journey of religious faith
- an elegy in many ways for a vanishing world & a testimony to a family he had fallen in love with a decade earlier. The Lygons of Madresfield were every bit as glamorous eccentric & 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 & complex as the family that inspired him
- a family deeply traumatised when their father was revealed as a homosexual & forced to flee the country. This brilliantly original biography unlocks for the first time the extent to which Waughs great novel encoded & transformed his own experiences. In so doing it illuminates the loves & obsessions that shaped his life & brings us inevitably to a secret that dared not speak its name.