Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Simon Fraser, 15th Lord Lovat" in English language version.
Two key figures, symbolising the proletarian takeover of the world which Waugh feared, are the trilogy's war heroes. Corporal-Major Ludovic, saturnine and Faustian, achieves heroic status by murder and emerges post-war as author of a romantic bestseller dangerously like Brideshead. He is based on no one as far as I can discover, and I think is an alter-ego of Waugh himself. Trimmer, aka McTavish, the former hairdresser on the Queen Mary, becomes a hero by cowardice, and conceives the son who is to be the heir to Crouchback, the hero-narrator. Waugh never shadow-boxes, as Uncle Tony sometimes does. He always plays for keeps. And by vindictive cunning of a high order, he manages to foist the ultra-plebeian Trimmer on the exquisite person of Brigadier Lord Lovat, head of the clan Fraser, who had his own family regiment and was known from his looks as "the upper-class Erroll Flynn". "Shimi" Lovat committed the unforgivable sin of ejecting Waugh from the Commandos since, he told me, "he had made himself so hated by his men they would have shot him in the back as soon as they went into action." So Waugh made Lovat into Trimmer. Once, when I happened to say a word in praise of Waugh, "Shimi" let forth a scream of rage and pain: "Do you realise, thanks to that monster, I am Trimmer?"
