'Two lost souls': an extended comparison of Evelyn Waugh's Sebastian Flyte and Anthony Powell's Charles Stringham

Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell were close contemporaries and, for much of their lives, also close friends and neighbours in Somerset. Their literary work also shows surprising parallels, mainly in their description of the characters of Sebastian Flyte (from Brideshead Revisited) and Charles Stringham (from A Dance to the Music of Time). Both characters are depicted as Peter Pan figures, boys reluctant to grow up and face the realities of everyday life; both succumb to alcoholism and end up wasting what are, to all intents and purposes, promising lives. The article charts their respective presentations, their decline and their fall and also draws parallels to historical precedents, for example the figure of T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia).