Edmund Campion » (New Edition)

Although he s best known for Brideshead Revisited, his melancholy look back at the twilight of the English aristocracy, it's Evelyn Waugh s genius for satire that truly distinguishes him. His acid wit and relentless drive to uncover hypocrisy and pretension make him a writer whose sweet way with words is equally matched by his powerful, almost bitter satires of modern culture.

Evelyn Waugh presented his biography of St. Edmund Campion, the Elizabethan poet, scholar and gentleman who became the haunted, trapped and murdered priest as "a simple, perfectly true story of heroism and holiness."

But it is written with a novelist's eye for the telling incident and with all the elegance and feeling of a master of English prose. From the years of success as an Oxford scholar, to entry into the newly founded Society of Jesus and a professorship in Prague, Campion's life was an inexorable progress towards the doomed mission to England. There followed pursuit, betrayal, a spirited defense of loyalty to the Queen, and a horrifying martyr's death at Tyburn.