Reviews of Brideshead Revisited
“Lush and evocative... the one Waugh which best expresses at once the profundity of change and the indomitable endurance of the human spirit.”
The Times
“A many-faceted book... beautifully told by one of the most exhilarating stylists of our time.”
Newsweek
“Waugh’s most deeply felt novel... Brideshead Revisited tells an absorbing story in imaginative terms. By indirection it summarizes and comments upon a time and a society... Mr. Waugh is very definitely an artist, with something like a genius for precision and clarity not surpassed by any novelist writing in English in his time.”
John K. Hutchens, New York Times
“This is Waugh’s best. Can one say more of genius?”
E.L. Lewis, Library Journal
“Waugh is likely to figure as the only first-rate comic genius that has appeared in English since Bernard Shaw.”
Edmund Wilson
“In fifteen novels of cunning construction and lapidary eloquence, Evelyn Waugh developed a wickedly hilarious yet fundamentally religious assault on a century that in his opinion, had ripped up the nourishing taproot of tradition and let wither all the dear things of the world.”
“Brideshead Revisited has exerted a powerful hold on the British imagination for more than sixty years... an exceptional read.”
“First and last an enchanting story... Brideshead Revisited has a magic that is rare in current literature. It is a world in itself, and the reader lives in it and is loath to leave it when the last page is turned.”
E.C. Chilton, Saturday Review
“The man was incapable of writing a bad sentence”
The Washington Times
“A king of comedy and of tragedy for almost three decades.”
Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic Monthly