I’m a major Evelyn Waugh fan and consider him the best novelist in English of the 20thC. I don’t necessarily feel that strongly about “Brideshead”, however. As he himself pointed out, he wrote it in the depths of the privations of World War 2 and possibly overdid the quail’s egg factor. An over-cooked Oxford didn’t work for this grammar school oik in a straitened Cambridge, and some of the minor characters - the Irish priest, the nanny, the ghastly tutor - just don’t work. The central female character doesn’t work all that well either, but Waugh wasn’t all that good at women. His bores are however very true to life and, for a cradle Catholic, the “twitch on the thread” chapter is very powerful. It’s not however a book I’ve re-read for maybe twenty years.

The books I do re-read regularly are “Decline and Fall” - because it makes me laugh out loud, sufficient enough reason I’d say - and the Sword of Honour trilogy, much the best novel to have come out of World War 2. Crouchback’s military career, from a romantic idealism and comradeship, through cowardice and betrayal to a final act of Christian self-knowledge and self-abnegation I find intensely moving. The characterisation is strong, even of nameless recurring characters, and the comic set pieces - the Isle of Mugg dinner, or his mystified brother-in-law - are as funny as anything he ever wrote. Oh, and as a stylist his prose is just wonderful to listen to, as it were. And I can’t pass the hotel at Glasgow Central station without tipping my imaginary hat.

Oh, and “Scoop” is very funny too. Boot was in part modelled on Bill Deedes, as everyone knows.

More than the novels, I often re-read his collected “Letters” (written during the day when sober) and “Diaries” (written in the evening when drunk). Both are superb and hugely recommended. (My favourite entry in the latter is at the end of July 1939, when he visited the country house that was at the end of the garden of the cottage I grew up in. It’s understated but, as far as one can tell, absolutely accurate. These things count.)

I read “A Dance” as a student during an enchanting affair, and so it has a certain reminiscential attraction. Later I took it as my special subject on a telly quiz called “Mastermind” and it didn’t stand up at all well to re-reading. Hence my toying with re-reading it over Christmas.

Golly, is that the time?

And: are you a Brideshead fanatic? I just read it for the first time and think I would have appreciated it more if certain friends hadn’t oversold it.