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WHY revisit it? That is the first question people ask about the film version of Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh's elegiac novel about faith, love and aristocratic young men between the wars. Surely the definitive version was Charles Sturridge's famous television version of 1981 that, over a languorous and luxurious 12 hours that no television station would contemplate today, delivered practically the entire book in pictures with Jeremy Irons's silken voice-over. We live, after all, in the era of the DVD box set. Nobody need feel they missed Brideshead. When it comes to it, the book itself - unlike many of the weighty or archaic tomes that are adapted as costume dramas - slips down as easily as any film or TV drama; its complexities so elegantly delineated that it scarcely seems to have been written at all. A film crammer,... [read full story]
