you're missing the religion: Waugh punishes his characters because his bleak, Manichean vision requires that one must suffer to be saved even if that salvation is firmly off the page. (Indeed, one might say he taught his own children too well, that life is about punishment.) Some critics, with little feeling or understanding of the religious mindset (paging Christopher Hitchens), have applauded Waugh's unyielding viciousness as the highest expression of his comic impulse: but it is impossible not to see a horrible theology at work in if you happen to have endured a Catholic education, or a deeply reactionary politics, if you happen to be familiar with the history of the 1920s and 1930s.

What makes Brideshead Revisited Waugh's strongest novel is that he stops persecuting his characters and allows them to persecute themeselves within the context of a genuine period of historical crisis for the British ruling class, whose days were clearly numbered before the actual onset of war (read David Cannadine's excellent "The Decline and Fall of the British Artistocracy"). In this context, the dazzling gaiety of Oxbridge in the 1920s signals both decadence and death, the last party before the end of an entire way of life. If Catholicism held the lure of a haven for many aristocrats, and an acceptable form of neofascism for would-be aristocrats like T.S. Eliot, it proves a bitter panacea for the Marchmain family. What makes Brideshead Revisited Waugh's greatest work is precisely what undermines his comic novels: there is no salvation in this world; there is only endurance. And in the precise lyricism of his prose, and even in his supposedly failed ending, Waugh's stiff upper lip seems to quiver, for once, with genuine, heart-tormented emotion. Across time and in a different millieu, this may have spoiled into treacle or schmaltz, but it surely accounts for the enduring power of the novel. Tragedy may be underdeveloped comedy, as Patrick Kavanagh noted; but it feels more real.

At least, these are my thoughts sitting in bed before breakfast. Alas, Jeeves is not about to bring me some kippers and the morning paper, but like many posters, I find it difficult not to see Wodehouse as the English comic writer nonpareil.