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Title: Temporary Beauty
Review: Waugh's technique as a noncomic prose stylist can be summarized as follows: adopt an unhappy view of the world and describe it with strange nouns. Fine as this book undoubtedly is, that does not make for timeless writing. What you have in Brideshead Revisited is an advanced lexicon made to seem grave and thoughtful by the unreasonably harsh view its characters take of luxury. I am not here to denounce the rich and I'm sympathetic to the kind of love described in this book. I think, however, that I was bored by the 450th word for flower turned out by the end of Book One. This seems quibbling but God must be in the details, and I think the incompleteness sensed by other reviewers on this site is a result of Waugh's preference for unusual words over unusual meaning.
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