She named his Oxford lovers in order as Richard Pares, Alistair Graham and Hugh Lygon.  Byrne said that while he was "candid" about the relationships with Pares and the well-heeled Graham in his autobiography, he refrained from explicitly describing them as homosexual.  This was because by then he was a respected Catholic, and homosexual sex was still illegal.  But she said: "It's obvious what he is saying, without spelling it out."  She added: "He writes in a letter to Nancy Mitford [the novelist] and says he has been to visit Richard Pares, who was his first homosexual love. First."  While most biographies had "hedged their bets" about whether he had a sexual relationship with Richard Pares, she said: "It's absolutely clear to me he did have a fully-fledged affair."  Following that first homosexual experience he had one with Graham, whom she discovered sent Waugh a naked picture of himself. The British Library, which holds the photograph, would not let her publish it in her book.  She also said she had unearthed definitive evidence that he had a physical relationship with Hugh Lygon, including a letter written by Oxford history don AL Rowse, and an interview with a female friend.  That relationship was top secret, she said, because Lygon's father was Lord Beecham, who was exiled after being found to have gay relationships with servants.  "Lord Beecham was outed by his brother-in-law, like Lord Marchmain in Brideshead."  In fact, she said, Brideshead was even more autobiographical than has previously been supposed.  Teddy-bear carrying Sebastian Flyte was a "composite character" of Lygon and Graham, she said.  "In some of the manuscripts he sometimes writes 'Alistair' for 'Sebastian'," she noted.  "As Waugh's own brother said, there is a very heavy dose of autobiography in Brideshead."  The writer left heavy hints that the relationship between Charles Ryder – whom she described as Waugh in disguise – had a physical relationship with Sebastian Flyte.  She said: "In the book he writes 'To know and love another human being is the root of all wisdom.' He doesn't write, 'to know and love a woman', and I think that is significant."  More evidence of his homosexual relationships came from a review he wrote of Degenerate Oxford, a book written by a friend called Terence Greenidge about life at the university in the early 1920s.  While Greenidge described such relationships between male undergraduate as "romantic", Waugh said it failed to identify them for what they were – physical relationships.
Evelyn Waugh, the author of Brideshead Revisited, conducted "fully fledged"   homosexual love affairs with three fellow students at Oxford, a new   biography has claimed.