First, a confession. When Evelyn Waugh published Sword of Honour, as fine a post-war novel as any in the English language, I wrote a crass review of it. It was 1965; I was then in my late twenties and should have known better. Accusing Waugh of being “a social Philistine” unable to imagine the lives of those outside his own class, I was enlisting in the chorus of fashionable leftists making it their business to dismiss him as a preposterous reactionary. Waugh liked to tease my father, Alan Pryce-Jones, a writer and a Catholic convert like him, as “the man …