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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary edge of The Spectator.

And this week, my guests are

going to be talking about the 75th anniversary this month of Bride's Head Revisited, Evil and War's

great novel, so influential that even when I was an undergraduate, it was inspiring any number of

Faye public schoolboys to turn up with teddy bears.

My guests are Philip Hensher, our chief critic,

and Alexander Waugh, who's Evil in War's grandson

and the general editor of the 43 volume

work in progress of the Oxford edition of Evil in Wars works.

Welcome both.

To start with, can I just ask, Bridesheads has a huge cultural reach,

but where does it stand in Wars 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. The thing about war is he has

an interesting canon. On the one hand, it is all bound in. So if you read the books in the order they were written, you'll find different themes emerge and change and alter and are chucked out and new ones added. So the whole thing is, in one sense, a single canon. In another sense, you can divide it up into three parts, the early comedies,

which some people prefer and think of the funniest things like Decline and Fall, Scoop, Black

Mischief, etc. Then Brideshead, which sort of stands alone, and then the later, people say,

slightly more serious books. Brideshead stands alone in a sense that it was a culmination for him. He described it

as his manum opus when he was writing it, but then he didn't really continue in that vein. And so

...