'This is a pacey and colourful read … elegantly written.' – Daisy Dunn, The Times
'The whole book reads rather like a Powell novel, with unexpected meetings and reversals … it is a constant pleasure.' – Mark Amory, The Spectator
'At a rollicking pace, it follows the post-Oxford careers of all the main Hypocrites … Waugh addicts will wish to add it to their shelves.' – A.N. Wilson, Times Literary Supplement
Daily Mail top ten history book of 2022
Described by one habitué as 'a kind of early twentieth-century Hell Fire Club', the Hypocrites Club counted some of the brightest of the future 'Bright Young People' among its members. The one-time secretary was Evelyn Waugh, who used ten of his fellow Hypocrites as inspiration for his fictional characters – seven of them in Brideshead Revisited alone.
The Hypocrites didn't just lend themselves to Waugh's fiction. Many went on to prominence themselves, including Anthony Powell, Robert Byron, Henry Green, Claud Cockburn and Tom Driberg. Hellfire is the first full-length portrait of this scandalous club and its famous members, who continued to be thorns in the Establishment's side – throughout war and austerity – for the next five decades.