Book Club, from the archives: 80 years of Brideshead Revisited
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 28 August 2025
⏱️ 44 minutes
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Summary
This week's Book Club podcast marks the 80th anniversary this year of the publication of Brideshead Revisited. This conversation is from the archives, originally recorded in 2020 to mark its 75th anniversary.
To discuss Evelyn Waugh's great novel, Sam Leith is joined by literary critic and author Philip Hensher, and by the novelist's grandson (and general editor of Oxford University Press's complete Evelyn Waugh) Alexander Waugh. What made the novel so pivotal in Waugh's career, what did it mean to the author and how did he revise it? And why have generations of readers, effectively, misread it?
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| 0:37.1 | Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary edge of The Spectator. |
| 0:42.7 | And this week, my guests are going to be talking about the 75th anniversary this month of Bride's Head Revisited, |
| 0:50.1 | Evil in War's great novel, so influential that even when I was an undergraduate, it was inspiring |
| 0:55.0 | any number of Fay public school boys to turn up with teddy bears. My guests are Philip Hensher, |
| 1:02.0 | our chief critic, and Alexander Waugh, who's Evil in War's grandson and the general editor of the |
| 1:07.6 | 43 volume work in progress of the Oxford edition of Evil in Wars works. Welcome both. |
| 1:14.8 | To start with, can I just ask, Bridesheads has a huge cultural reach, but where does it stand in |
| 1:22.2 | war's canon? Is it his masterpiece? Is it the most important of his books? Well, war aficionados can squabble about that as much as they like. |
| 1:30.3 | The thing about war is he has an interesting canon. |
| 1:33.3 | On the one hand, it is all bound in. |
| 1:36.3 | So if you read the books in the order they are written, |
| 1:38.3 | you'll find different themes emerge and change and alter and are chucked out and new ones added. |
| 1:43.3 | So the whole thing is, |
| 1:44.8 | in one sense, a single canon. In another sense, you can divide it up into three parts, the early |
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