The Lygons, the Flytes and Evelyn Waugh

Paula Byrne’s Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead scores several significant breakthroughs, and I warmly commend it to general readers as well as Waugh enthusiasts. It follows hard on the heels of Jane Mulvagh’s equally interesting Madresfield: One Home, One Family, One Thousand Years.

The books are complementary. Mad World is a biography of Waugh that works outward from his close friendship with the Lygons of Madresfield. Mulvagh’s Madresfield begins and ends with (unremarkable) chapters about Waugh but is essentially a fascinating history of Madresfield, a country house with a Tudor core and enveloping Neo-Gothic extensions, and of the Lygon (earlier and in the USA, Ligon) family.

The Lygons, who date from the Norman Conquest, have lived uninterruptedly at Madresfield since the sixteenth century. Because the family has been involved in most of the significant developments of the last 400 years, their story illuminates every period of English history since Henry…