Kermode is an English educator, literary critic, essayist, and editor. In the following essay, he examines Waugh's depiction of religious faith in England after the Reformation, particularly the place of Catholicism among the upper classes in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as represented in Brideshead Revisited.

Higdon is an American writer and educator. In the following essay, he argues that Brideshead Revisited depicts very deliberate homosexual relationships, contrary to the opinions of other critics, whom Higdon considers deeply in denial.

In the following essay, Hallett examines Charles Ryder's reaction in Brideshead Revisited to the Catholicism of the Flyte family.

Brideshead Revisited, less a satire than a romance, marks the first accomplishment of the second stage of Evelyn Waugh's career. Though something of the old, hard brilliance remains, there is a new tone of lush nostalgia in this work, the first of Waugh's novels in which his Roman Catholicism is pervasive. Indeed, excepting Helena, it is Waugh's only novel to date in which a religious theme has been dominant; although Guy Crouchback is a Catholic and Roman Catholicism figures constantly...

The new novel by Evelyn Waugh—Brideshead Revisited—has been a bitter blow to this critic. I have admired and praised Mr. Waugh [see excerpt in CLC, Vol. 13], and when I began reading Brideshead Revisited, I was excited at finding that he had broken away from the comic vein for which he is famous and expanded into a new dimension. The new story—with its subtitle, The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder—is a "serious" novel, in the conventional sense,...

The principal item of interest in this collection of Evelyn Waugh short stories ["Charles Ryder's Schooldays and Other Stories"] most of them first published in 1936, is the title piece, a lately discovered prequel—as they do say these days—to "Brideshead Revisited." Written in 1945, it gives us a glimpse of the novel's narrator, the rather recessive Charles Ryder, as a fifth former of 15 or 16 at Spierpoint, his public school (not one of the great pub...