Mr. Evelyn Waugh is a highly gifted and imaginative writer, but I must confess to a strong personal prejudice against his choice of subjects. In Brideshead Revisited (Chapman and Hall, pp. 304, 10s) he is concerned with a titled Roman Catholic family of considerable wealth. The elder son is a religiously minded nonentity, the younger a man of great personal charm but a confirmed dipsomaniac, and the daughter who marries a divorced Canadian in face of the opposition of her family, to whom such a marriage would mean ╥living in sin,╙ does not remain faithful to him. In short, Mr. Waugh╒s principal themes are adultery, perversion, and drunkenness, and while I could not fail to admire the brilliance of his writing, I greatly disliked his story.
