![]() ![]() “Peyraguey is perhaps too sweet for strawberries,” says Adam. When they meet properly Sebastian, divine in dove-grey flannel, sweeps Charles up saying: “I’ve got a motor-car and a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Chateau Peyraguey- which isn’t a wine you’ve ever tasted, so don’t pretend. Charles first encounters Sebastian when he vomits drunkenly into his rooms through an open window. Silvery, yet so much deeper than it’s cultural shorthand, all does not end well. As crisp as a collar for a college ball, as louche as a pair of flannels, it harks nostalgically to a pre-war golden age describing the intense infatuation between the bourgeois Charles Ryder and the hedonistic Lord Sebastian Flyte. I didn’t go to Oxford but all Brideshead readers feel they have. “There was always a sense that Brideshead was somewhere close,” says Simon, a more recent Oxford graduate. “Even if you rejected the whole Sebastian aesthetic, you were aware of it.” ![]() “You couldn’t escape it,” says Adam, who was at Oxford in the 1970s. Those dreaming spires, emerald quadrangles and golden hours – “an enclosed and enchanted garden” just waiting. Brideshead is to Oxford as Oliver Twist is to London or Bonfire of the Vanities is to New York. ![]() Downton look downright shabby comparatively. Like Sebastian Flyte, Waugh’s classic novel of country houses, Catholicism and class charms all before it. Brideshead is one of those books you feel you’ve read. ![]()
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