Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder is a novel by the English writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1945.

It follows, from the 1920s to the early 1940s, the life and romances of Charles Ryder, especially his friendship with the Flytes, a family of wealthy English Catholics who live in a palatial mansion, Brideshead Castle.

Sebastian's family is Catholic, which influences the Flytes' lives as well as the content of their conversations, all of which surprises Charles, who had always believed Christianity was "without substance or merit".

This marriage causes great sorrow to her mother because Rex, though initially planning to convert to Catholicism, turns out to be a divorcé with an ex-wife living in Canada.

He and Julia subsequently marry without fanfare in the Savoy Chapel, an Anglican church where marriage between divorcés with one or more prior living spouses is permissible.

Cordelia returns from ministering to the wounded in the Spanish Civil War with disturbing news about Sebastian's nomadic existence and steady decline over the past few years.

On the eve of the Second World War, the ageing Lord Marchmain, terminally ill, returns to Brideshead to die in his ancestral home.

Appalled by the marriage of his elder son Brideshead to a middle-class widow past childbearing age, he names Julia heir to the estate, which prospectively offers Charles marital ownership of the house.

[4]The book brings the reader, through the narration of the initially agnostic Charles Ryder, in contact with the severely flawed but deeply Catholic Flyte family.

Julia, who entered a marriage with Rex Mottram that is invalid in the eyes of the Catholic Church, is involved in an extramarital affair with Charles.

Charles kneels down in front of the tabernacle of the Brideshead chapel and says a prayer, "an ancient, newly learned form of words"[5] – implying recent instruction in the catechism.

Cordelia, in conversation with Charles Ryder, quotes a passage from the Father Brown detective story "The Queer Feet":I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.

One reads in the book that Brideshead has "the atmosphere of a better age", and (referring to the deaths of Lady Marchmain's brothers in the Great War) "these men must die to make a world for Hooper ... so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat, wet handshake, his grinning dentures".

[9] The question of whether the relationship between Charles and Sebastian is homosexual or platonic has been debated, particularly in an extended exchange between David Bittner and John Osborne in the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies from 1987 to 1991.

[10] In 1994 Paul Buccio argued that the relationship was in the Victorian tradition of "intimate male friendships", which includes "Pip and Herbert Pocket [from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations], ... Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, Ratty and Mole (The Wind in the Willows)",[11] and Tennyson and Arthur Henry Hallam (In Memoriam).

"[13] In the novel, Cara, Lord Marchmain's mistress, says to Charles that his romantic relationship with Sebastian forms part of a process of emotional development typical of "the English and the Germans".

[11] Waugh wrote that the novel "deals with what is theologically termed 'the operation of Grace', that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself".

In various letters, Waugh refers to the novel a number of times as his magnum opus; however, in 1950 he wrote to Graham Greene stating "I re-read Brideshead Revisited and was appalled."

In Waugh's preface to his revised edition of Brideshead (1959), the author explained the circumstances in which the novel was written, following a minor parachute accident in the six months between December 1943 and June 1944.

[26] In 1981 Brideshead Revisited was adapted as an 11-episode TV serial, produced by Granada Television and aired on ITV, starring Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder and Anthony Andrews as Lord Sebastian Flyte.

To mark the 70th anniversary of its publication in 2015, BBC Radio 4 Extra rebroadcast a four-part adaptation (from 2003), with Ben Miles as Charles Ryder and Jamie Bamber as Lord Sebastian Flyte.

In 2008 Brideshead Revisited was developed into a feature film of the same title, with Emma Thompson as Lady Marchmain, Matthew Goode as Charles Ryder, and Ben Whishaw as Lord Sebastian Flyte.