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Flyte or Fancy: Evelyn Waugh meets Harry Clifton on the road to Brideshead
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781838136581
Publisher: Chrityplays Publications
Published: May 28 2025
Pages: 304
Weight: 0.90
Height: 0.68 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
An insightful, fictionalised slice of literary history... Amazon
As Brideshead Revisted turns 80, how author Evelyn Waugh took inspiration from the tragic aristocrat of Lytham Hall in creating his own waywardly eccentric Sebastian Flyte in his iconic novel of upper-class foibles. The Sunday Express
The extraordinary life of Harry Clifton Lancashire Life
Explore the tumultuous world of Harry Clifton, a figure whose life story reads like a novel, filled with grandeur, crisis, and heartbreak... Explaining History Podcast
Evelyn Waugh described the Cliftons of Lytham Hall as all tearing mad during visits in the 1930s. Join him and Harry Clifton on a journey of love, friendship, excess and liberation as they fight to be free of the sexual, dynastic and religious expectations the world demands of them.
With a mix of fact and fiction, join us for this journey to a land that might-have-been as we meet the eccentric Harry Clifton and his family, and his adventures with friends Bertie Pemberton-Billing and Evelyn Waugh at Oxford in the 1920s, whilst an undergraduate at Christ Church. Discover their association with the Hypocrites Club and the notorious private drinking clubs that revelled in hedonism and sexual liberation. Harry and Evelyn were both eventually sent down from Oxford without degrees.
Harry's irresponsible decisions, after the death of his father, and his wanton disregard for his family's heritage and reputation, and his obsession with the occult and mysticism, that led him to rely on the White Goddess and the Ghost of Hollywood to guide him with disasterous financial decisions. His darker side inspired by his favourite author and poet Edgar Alan Poe.
From an equally disastrous marriage to purchasing Imperial Faberge Eggs, private suites at the Ritz Hotel and Claridges, and the squandering of eye-watering amounts of money, a doomed foray into film producing with Brian Desmond Hurst, his journey continues through the 1930s as his reckless behaviour threatens hundreds of years of his family's reputation and heritage.
On the eve of WW2 it all comes crashing down. Evelyn Waugh decides to separate from his friend but do the seeds of that friendship with Harry influence Waugh's character Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited? His most famous novel was finally published in 1945 much to the displeasure of Harry's widowed mother Violet Clifton. She never spoke to Waugh again.
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