The yearning for a lost or different upbringing is fairly universal, and one of Brideshead's keys is precisely the one that unlocks the gate to it: This applies to imagined times and places as well as to real ones: Waugh uses the phrase 'secret garden' and also - alluding to the Oxford of Lewis Carroll - to an 'enclosed and enchanted garden' reachable by a 'low door in the wall'. Well, to answer that first and easiest question, it is entirely possible to feel nostalgia for homelands, and for periods, which one has never experienced oneself. Why does this novel have such a tenacious hold on the imagination, even of people who have never been to England or never visited a country house? I, too, find that Brideshead is oddly capacious and elastic, disclosing new depths and perspectives with each reading. Graham Greene once wrote that, in his own memory, that same inaugural passage had seemed very long and elaborate, and that he was surprised on rereading it to find how brief it was. But most of all, they were faithful to Evelyn Waugh's beautiful dialogue and cadence, both in set-piece scenes and in sequences of languorous voice-over in Oxford and Venice and - perhaps decisively - in the opening passage, where the melancholic Captain Charles Ryder hears the almost healing word 'Brideshead' spoken again: 'a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror's name of such magic power, that, at its ancient sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight'.

The locations, plainly, required little or no embellishment. The directors Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay-Hogg achieved their 1981 success by gorgeous photography, of course, and also by generally inspired casting. (My son was born in 1984 and as I was carrying a teddy bear home, and happening that day to be wearing a white linen suit, I was astonished by the number of passers-by in Washington DC who shouted 'Hi Sebastian!' at me as I tooled along.) ' It is more than a quarter of a century since the late William F Buckley introduced the Granada TV series to the American viewers of the Public Broadcasting System, and the residual effect is one of what Harold Isaacs once called 'scratches on the mind': a very durable if sometimes vague cultural impression. ' 'I liked the Anthony Andrews character better. 'I thought the one who played Jeremy Irons was a bit thin.

A s I drove away from a California screening of the new film version of Brideshead Revisited, I was amused to overhear the comments of my companions from the back seat.

Brideshead book