Brideshead Revisited first aired in America in the winter of 1982. I was in art school then, and living with my parents because we couldn’t afford the extra expense of me living on my own. I had never travelled outside my country; I grew up in Chicago and all my ideas about the rest of the world came from reading books. The only thing I had read by Evelyn Waugh was a short story, “The Man Who Liked Dickens”.