Eade’s account shows little of how Waugh’s spiritual renewal helped him deal with addictions to alcohol and sex, and with issues of fidelity in his marriage to Laura Herbert and their family, not to mention with his lifelong search for God and meaning in the modern secularized world. Disappointingly, A Life Revisited provides few insights into Waugh’s motivation for giving up his youthful dedication to high Anglicanism in favor of the Catholic Church in 1930, which made him one of the most notable converts of the 20th century. When Eade does spend time on the characters in the novels, it is primarily to speculate about the real-life models for the most highly satirized victims, a guessing game played by most previous biographers of Waugh.

The new material is mostly letters from Waugh’s 1930 flame, Teresa “Baby” Jungman, whom he pursued after the failure of his first marriage, but these letters reveal more about Jungman’s refusal to marry him than about Waugh himself.Įade admits that he is not writing a “critical” biography, so he includes newspaper reviews of Waugh’s books but little literary analysis of the writer whom novelists Graham Greene and Henry Green called “the greatest novelist” of their generation. Unfortunately, Philip Eade’s claim to present a “fresh portrait” of this “life revisited” does not hold up to even a casual reading.

Finally, it's despatched to London, where Philip Gooden's Nick Revill will determine its ultimate fate.Any biographer of Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) writing 50 years after the writer’s death has to justify competing with major predecessors, such as Christopher Sykes’s 1975 portrait of his friend, Martin Stannard’s two-volume academic study of Waugh’s life and works (1986, 1992) and Douglas Lane Patey’s critical analysis of Waugh’s masterpieces (1992). Thirty years later, several suspicious deaths occur in Cambridge - and, once again, the tainted relic has a crucial part to play.

In 1323, in Exeter, Michael Jecks' Sir Baldwin has reason to suspect its involvement in at least five violent deaths. In Oxford in 1269, the discovery of a decapitated monk leads Ian Morson's academic sleuth William Falconer to uncover a link to the relic. Investigating the death, Bernard Knight's protagonist, Crowner John learns of its dark history. Several decades later, the Cross turns up in the possession of a dealer, robbed and murdered en route to Glastonbury. The relic is said to be cursed: anyone who touches it will meet an untimely and gruesome end.

Amidst the chaos, an English knight is entrusted with a valuable religious relic: a fragment of the True Cross, allegedly stained with the blood of Christ.

Edmund Campion by Evelyn Waugh