Page 18 - Guildhall Coverage Book 2020-21
P. 18
8 December 2020
Early in Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited, protagonist Charles Ryder describes
the contrast between the brutality of army training during the Second World War and an
unexpected recollection of joy upon revisiting Brideshead. He describes the sudden cutting
short of a voice “that had been bawling in [his] ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond
number” and how the ensuing silence is gradually replaced by “a multitude of sweet and
natural and long-forgotten sounds”. He attributes this to “a conjuror’s name of such ancient
power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take
flight”.
