Late one evening in March 1924, a tipsy young nun was seen trying to slip into Balliol, an all-male Oxford college, just as the gates were about to close for the night. The nun - subsequently unmasked as the son of the college bursar - was returning after a fancy-dress party at a notorious Oxford social club, one known to the university proctors for its hedonistic ways, heavy drinking and wayward behaviour. This was the final straw; the club was shut down.
Described by one habitu-s -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,
