Brideshead Revisited, published in 1945, was Evelyn Waugh’s first explicitly Catholic novel. It lost him, he wrote later, “such esteem” as he had enjoyed among his contemporaries. This wasn’t, however, on account of its Catholic theme. Graham Greene was then writing novels in which the Catholic argument was inescapable, and these were highly praised. It was the lush romanticism of Brideshead which delighted readers and offended severe critics. Waugh himself came to think he had overdone it, and would revise the novel 15 years later, removing some of its most flowery passages, and blaming his excesses on a time of spam and Nissen huts.