'[ The Brideshead Generation] has both style and substance, and is above all an enjoyable companion. It has a wildly amusing cast, here controlled by a skilful director.' Evening Standard 'Jovial and entertaining, full of the sort of stories that your friends will tell you if you don't read it before them.' Independent 'Carpenter has read widely and has collected an enormous fund of entertaining stories and facts.' Sunday Telegraph 'Hauntingly sad and wonderfully funny and by far the best thing Humphrey Carpenter has done.' Fiona MacCarthy, The Times

An account of the segment of English literary society which emerged between the wars and with hindsight, could be labelled The Brideshead Generation. The circle - all acquaintances of Evelyn Waugh - included Graham Greene, Nancy Mitford, Cyril Connolly, John Betjeman and Randolph Churchill.

"A terrifically engaging and original biography of Evelyn Waugh and the family that provided him with the most significant friendships of his life and inspired his masterpiece, BRIDESHEAD REVISITED"--Provided by publisher.

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Sunday Times, and the Financial Times A completely fresh view of one of the most gifted—and fascinating—writers of our time, the enigmatic author of Brideshead Revisited Graham Greene hailed Evelyn Waugh as “the greatest novelist of my generation,” and in recent years Waugh’s reputation has only grown. Now, half a century after Waugh’s death in 1966, with Evelyn Waugh, Philip Eade has delivered a hugely entertaining biography that is both authoritative and full of new information, some of it sensational. Drawing on extensive unseen primary sources, Eade’s book sheds new light on many of the key phases and themes of Waugh’s life: his difficult relationship with his embarrassingly sentimental father; his formative homosexual affairs at Oxford; his unrequited love for various Bright Young Things; his disastrous first marriage; his momentous conversion to Roman Catholicism; his unconventional yet successful second marriage; his checkered wartime career; and his shattering nervous breakdown. Along the way, we come to understand not only Waugh’s complex relationship with the aristocracy, but also the astonishing power of his wit, and the love, fear, and loathing that he variously inspired in others. Waugh was famously difficult, and Eade brilliantly captures the myriad facets of his character, even as he casts new light on the novels that have dazzled generations of readers.

In this tribute to teleheaven, Jeffries explores the way our lives have been coloured by looking at the world through the cathode ray tube, and how the addiction to a little flickering box in the corner has shaped our lives since the late 1950s.

Vile Bodies is a 1930 novel satirising the bright young things: decadent young London society after World War I. The title appears in a comment made by the novel’s narrator in reference to the characters’ party-driven lifestyle: “All that succession and repetition of massed humanity... Those vile bodies...”