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Biographer Paula Byrne marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Evelyn Waugh with a talk with Waugh’s grandson, critic and writer Alexander Waugh, on the life of the novelist and the enduring popularity of his work.

Byrne is author of Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead. In it she sets out to capture Waugh through the friendships that mattered to him and looks at how his great novel, Brideshead Revisited, encoded and transformed his own experiences. She tells of Waugh’s relationship with the aristocratic family that inspired the novel. Byrne has also written biographies of Jane Austen and Mary Robinson and speaks at another festival event about her forthcoming biography of John F Kennedy’s sister Kathleen ‘Kick’ Kennedy.

Alexander Waugh is the grandson of Evelyn and eldest son of Auberon Waugh. He is currently working with Oxford University Press and the University of Leicester on a complete works of Evelyn Waugh. He is also author of a biography, Fathers and Sons, a portrait of the male relations across five generations of his own family, which was made into a BBC documentary. Alexander is also a music critic, classical record producer and author of a number of other books and an award-winning musical.

Here they talk to journalist and reviewer for the FT Suzi Feay.