Anthony Blanche stands on the high balcony with a megaphone. With practised stammer he recites The Waste Land to puzzled undergraduates walking below in Christ Church Meadow. ‘How I have surprised them!’ he assures the other Old Etonians gathered for languid lunch in Lord Sebastian Flyte’s rooms. In this single image, Evelyn Waugh fixes Blanche in our memories – privilege, aesthetes, the creeping arrival of bewildering new art to the Oxford of 1923.

In Paula Byrne’s Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead, we learn that Waugh drew on a real incident involving Harold Acton. The mysterious Anthony Blanche has been at various times identified with Acton, Brian Howard and the spy Anthony Blunt. Yet whatever his inspiration, Blanche is neither caricature nor type, but fully formed. Like the poems he declaims, Blanche is commentary personified, appearing throughout the novel to convey unwelcome truths.