Extract

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I have been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

A young painter at Oxford falls under the spell of a dissolute, teddy-bear-carrying aristocrat and through him into the orbit of an old Catholic family whose great house becomes the landscape of his longing. Waugh wrote this novel during a wartime leave in 1944, and the prose aches with the knowledge that the world it describes is already vanishing: the punting, the plovers' eggs, the painted rooms, the grace before meals. Yet beneath the nostalgia runs a theological argument as relentless as any sermon. One by one, the Flyte family is hauled back to God on a hook they cannot see. The novel asks whether divine love is mercy or violence, and answers, with devastating beauty, that it may be both.