Fathers and Sons (2007)

English eccentrics abound in Fathers and Sons — a look at the writer-heavy Waugh family. Alexander Waugh begins with his sadistic great-great-grandfather, a doctor referred to by his descendants as ''the Brute,'' who was given to firing a shotgun inches away from the ears of son Arthur to fortify the boy's character. Arthur himself had an unhealthily obsessive relationship with his heir, the sex-crazed Alec, while Alec's brother Evelyn — author of Brideshead Revisited — once dismissed his two oldest children as ''a great bore.'' It is a description that could not be applied to the hugely entertaining tales of literature and lunacy featured here.