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 public schools, being less than a century old).

Dreadful place, invented, it seems clear, out of Waugh's unpleasant memories of his own school days at Lancing….

Waugh always wielded a stiletto pen, and his account of the school, the mean traditional tyrannies of upperclassmen over lowerclassmen, the pettifogging life, the posturing, and the cliques and the collective loneliness, is of the regimen that was meant to build character. Waugh seems to demonstrate that it...