Friend and companion of Evelyn Waugh at Oxford; their relationship is said to have inspired Brideshead Revisited.



Humphrey Carpenter points out in The Brideshead Generation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1990) that one of the first readers of Waugh's novel was Lady Pansy Lamb, who was someone who had grown up in and was intimately familiar with the milieu the novelist had sought to portray in his book.  She wrote to him that the "aristocratic society of the Twenties" he described in Brideshead Revisited did not really exist:  

    Nobody was brilliant, beautiful, rich & owner of a wonderful home though some were one or the other.
    Most were respectable [and] narrow-minded... You see English Society of the Twenties as something
    baroque and magnificent on its last legs... I fled from it because it seemed prosperous, bourgeois and
    practical and I believe it still is.

Waugh, says Carpenter, "was not recalling a historical golden age but inventing one." (p. 371).

So in answer to questions received recently from concerned readers of these pages, let me refer you to Troy Patterson's excellent review in SLATE [forwarded today by the helpful Justin] of Brideshead Revisited which I believe pretty much settles the matter.  To his insightful remarks I can only add that yes, I am sometimes a sucker for sentimental schlock.  Yes, a baroque invented golden age has a certain appeal.  Yes, Waugh was more fun when he was really being funny, and yes, at the end of the day I too prefer Vile Bodies.