Waugh also wrote nonfiction, including a number of travel books, biographies, and the first part of an autobiography, A Little Learning. To a great extent, all of Waugh’s work is autobiographical, based on people that he knew, experiences that he had, and places that he visited. However Waugh’s tone and purpose in each of the different categories can vary considerably. Brideshead Revisited, written while Waugh himself was on leave from the army in 1944, shows his growing nostalgia for the nowlost world he once so bitingly satirized.
World War I (1914-18). The earliest events in Brideshead Revisited take place in 1923, five years after the end of the First World War, yet the war hangs over the novel and its characters. Touted as the war to end all wars, the conflict pitted the Central Powers (primarily Germany, Austria- Hungary, and Turkey) against the Allies (France, Great Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan and, from 1917, the United States). Both sides fought with new, modern weaponry—machine guns, mustard gas, barbed wire, airplanes. These are the basic, easily understood facts; more difficult to grasp is the effect of the war on the world’s psyche, and for our purposes, the British psyche.
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