One cannot write on Waugh without the
historical context of his novels. Brideshead finished in l944 would never have been written were it not for WW II.
He himself was not an inner part of the society he describes with such insight. He was educated at the not very fashionable Lansing public school where an excellent teacher of English was its asset, forming Waugh as well as Raymond Chandler.
At Oxford he was not either at any of the smart colleges but certainly got to know the golden youth and indulged in the homosexual affairs so typical of the British upper classes (one wonders how they breed)
While immortalizing the ways and mannerisms of British society in Brideshead he himself pretended book was a story about God.
He is at his most relaxed in The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh edited by Charlotte Mosley (1996) (pocket by Sceptre). Writing for instance on May 5, l954:
"I now dislike my children all equally.Of children as of ¨procreation: - the pleasure momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable".
