Wiedersehen mit Brideshead

The reviewers who have given positive feedback for this series have done quite well and I have little to add. Sadly, there was one review that seemed to miss the point, and I would like to address this:

"We can suppose that Lord Marchmain pretended to convert to comfort his family. There is no such excuse for Charles, who has seen the damage that Catholicism did to the whole family."

Wrong. It was the shirking of religious principle that tore apart the family. Lord Marchmain left Catholicism and thought he had license to leave his wife, so he abandoned his children to a confused, fatherless upbringing. Had he remained true to his sacramental vow to stay, "for better or for worse," by his wife's side, the family would never have been so dysfunctional.

As for the vague homo-eroticism in the first few episodes, many young men at Oxford back in the day did go through such phases and often they were in fact merely PHASES. Evelyn Waugh himself apparently did.