I have finished reading and thinking over the experience before writing. I loved it as much as on earlier readings: Waugh's style is always a joy, and I love the gentle melancholy of the book. My antique Penguin has a Preface by Waugh, written in 1959, in which he writes:
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It was impossible to foresee, in the spring of 1944, the present cult of the English country house. It seemed then that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the sixteenth century.
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The feeling of this sense of impending loss is palpable. Waugh was writing of a past that would never come again, and he grieved for its departure. I loved this opening to Chapter 1 of Book Three:
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My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.
These memories, which are my life - for we possess nothing certainly except the past - were always with me. Like the pigeons of St Mark's, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning of war-time.
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Superb.