Ideas Matter: ‘Brideshead Revisited: World wars and the end of the old elite’

From the series ‘The elite: old and new’, theme of the boi
charity’s event The Academy, held online in November 2021.


Published in the weeks after VE day in 1945, just as British
voters swept a Labour Government into power, Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited was a surprise bestseller in both the UK and
America, and captured the imagination of generations of readers.
The story follows the life of Captain Charles Ryder and his
fateful obsession with the aristocratic Flyte family as they
slowly fall from grace and fortune during the interwar years. So
how does Waugh make sense of the decline of the British
establishment? Is the destruction of the old order, as one
character has it, ‘all on account of the war’? What drove Waugh’s
attacks on modernism? And what can the decline of the old elite
tell us about the elite of today?


Lecture by Helen Searls, chief operating officer, Feature Story
News (FSN); founder, Washington Hyenas’ Book Club


THE ACADEMY ONLINE IV: The elite: old and new To view the full
programme and some suggested background reading to the talks,
please visit  https://theboi.co.uk/academy-online-iv  


ASSOCIATED READING


For this lecture you may wish to read:-


READ: Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945
https://amzn.to/3pjY4VY  

READ: Frank Furedi, First World War: Still No End in Sight,
2013 https://amzn.to/3JaMqV9  



 


THE ACADEMY In the context of today’s instrumental approaches to
knowledge, The Academy summer school is a modest attempt to
demonstrate the value of scholarship, and of the worth of the
university as a place of free enquiry dedicated to the pursuit of
truth.


 


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