Brideshead Revisited - Charles as a narrator Flashcards
It is easy…
… Retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates
My theme is…
…Memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war time
For…
Nearly ten dead years
A.B on charm
It Spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.
It was…
Ten years later that she said this to me in a storm in the Atlantic.
I do not remember…
Hearing that your new baby was called Caroline. Why did you call it that?
Cover herself…
With grease […] she had a neat, hygienic ways for that too
She was not yet…
Thirty, but was approaching the zenith of her loveliness, all her rich promise abundantly fulfilled […] it would be idle to itemise and dissect her beauty, which was her own essence
This haunting…
Magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty
It was as though…
A deed of conveyance of her narrow loins had been drawn and sealed. I was making my first entry as a freeholder of the property I would enjoy and develop at leisure.
She was powerless…
To hurt me anymore; I was a free man, she had given me my manumission in that brief, sly lapse of hers; my cuckhold’s horns made me Lord of the forest.
In the two years…
Of our love, which seemed a lifetime, I have not seen her so moved or felt so powerless to help
Unable…
To look away for love of her beauty
It hurt to…
Think of Cordelia growing up ‘quite plain’ […] I thought her an ugly woman […] like the grunt of an animal returning to its basket
I date…
My Oxford life from my first meeting with Sebastian
I was in search of…
Love in those days […] I should find that low door in the wall […] which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden
I became part of…
The world which he sought to escape; I became one of the bonds which held him
He said more…
Than I can bear to remember, even at twenty years’ distance
A door had shut…
The low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden
A multitude of…
Sweet and natural and long forgotten sounds […] a conjurer’s name of such ancient power […] the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight
Exquisite…
Manmade landscape […] a sequestered place, enclosed and embraced […] the ground led, still unravished, to the neighbourly horizon
The windows…
Were open to the stars and the scented air, to the Indigo and silver, moonlit landscape of the valley
I, at any rate,…
Believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead
I felt a whole…
New system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones, was indeed a life giving spring
Need I reproach myself…
If sometimes I was taken by the vision?
Fried-fish shops […]
Works’ siren and the dance-hall band
Vast, twin fireplaces….
Of sculptured marble, the coved ceiling frescoed […] guilt mirrors and scagliola a pilasters
The hot…
Spring of anarchy rose […] and burst into the sunlight
Charles on Rex’s tortoise
Slightly obscene object
I remember the dinner well - […]
Caneton à la presse, a lemon soufflé
Imported and…
Re-erected in an alien but welcoming climate
Sebastian’s faith…
Was an enigma to me at that time, but not one which I felt particularly concerned to solve
It’s such a lot…
Of witchcraft and hypocrisy
