English writer Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, better known as Evelyn Waugh, was BOTD in 1903. Born in London to a middle-class family, he was educated at Oxford University, where he had affairs with his fellow students Hugh Lygon, Richard Pares and Alastair Graham. After graduating, he worked briefly at a boys’ private school, an experience recounted in his 1928 novel Decline and Fall. The book became an instant success, catapaulting him to literary celebrity. He became a prominent member of the aristocratic social circle known as the Bright Young Things, socialising with Harold Acton, Cecil Beaton, Robert Byron, Tom Driberg, Hamish St. Clair-Erskine, L. P. Hartley, Gavin Henderson, Brian Howard, James Lees-Milne, Tom Mitford, Richard, David and Olivia Plunket Greene, Edith and Osbert Sitwell and Stephen Tennant. He also formed a close friendship with Nancy Mitford, mentoring her early writing career and maintaining a witty gossipy correspondence over many decades. He solidified his literary reputation with his 1932 novel Vile Bodies, a razor-sharp satire of the Bright Young Things. He travelled extensively through Africa and South America in the 1930s, working as a newspaper correspondent, and served in the armed forces during World War Two, which informed much of his later work. He is best known for his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited, a melancholy drama about the artist Charles Ryder’s infatuation with the doomed aristocratic Flyte family. Steeped in nostalgia for the pre-war aristocracy and strongly influenced by Waugh’s conversion to Catholicism, it became a huge success. The homoerotic dimension of Charles and Sebastian’s friendship was inspired by Waugh’s affairs with Lygon and the Plunket Greene siblings, while the openly queer Anthony Blanche is thought to be a composite of Howard and Acton. His post-Brideshead output was less well received, complicated by his depression, alcoholism and drug dependency. In later years, he alienated himself from modern life, disapproving of Britain’s new welfare state and the rise of the working classes, and refused to drive or use typewriters or telephones. Married twice (firstly to a woman also named Evelyn), he had seven children, including the journalist and writer Auberon Waugh. He died in 1966 aged 62. The successful 1981 television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited led to a resurgence of interest in his life and work, and the publication of his hilarious correspondence with Mitford.