Main description:

Evelyn Waugh was already famous when Brideshead Revisited was published in 1945. The chronicle of a household, a family, and a journey of religious faith—an elegy for a vanishing world—Waugh's masterwork was a tribute and testimony to a family he had fallen in love with a decade earlier. The Lygons of Madresfield were every bit as glamorous, eccentric, and fascinating as their fictional Brideshead counterparts, their story just as compelling, filled with secrets and betrayals, scandals and unwavering love.

Mad World is Paula Byrne's innovative and engrossing biography of Evelyn Waugh, recalling the loves and obsessions that shaped his world and his writing, capturing Waugh through the friendships that mattered most to him, and exploring how he encoded the defining experiences of his adult life in his greatest literary work.

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“’Mad World’ is the perfect title for this sparkling book, a hybrid of family romance, incisive literary criticism, and deliciously hot gossip.”

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“A considerable contribution to literary history…includes enough gossipy asides to intrigue readers.”

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“A sharp, entertaining literary biography…A perceptive study of how Evelyn Waugh emerged from middle-class beginnings to inhabit the tony corridors described in BRIDESHEAD REVISITED.”

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“A splendid new book…While displaying the research values of a scholar Byrne also manages to write with the panache and timing of a popular novelist.”

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“Altogether excellent and wickedly entertaining…Scandalous detail enlivens every page of this delicious biography…Over the years I’ve read all the major biographies of Evelyn Waugh, and Byrne’s is…the fastest moving and the most fun.”

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“An engaging book…remarkably thorough…Deftly interweaving biographical details and textual analysis, Byrne makes the connections between Waugh’s art, Roman Catholic faith, and life dance.”

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“An utterly captivating and generous book with all the intimacy of a diary and the scholarly soundness of a fine biography…A singular accomplishment.”

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“Remarkable…not only a meticulously researched biography but also an enjoyable read.”

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“Well-researched and absorbing.”

Short description/annotation:

A terrifically engaging and original biography of one of England’s greatest novelists, Evelyn Waugh, and the glamorous, eccentric, debauched, and ultimately tragic family that provided him with the most significant friendships of his life and inspired his masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited. Fans of The Mitfords, D.J. Taylor’s Bright Young People, and Alexander Waugh’s Fathers and Sons, as well as Anglophiles in general, will find much to savor in Paula Byrne’s wonderful Mad World.