Decline and Fall

<p>2024 Reprint of the 1947 Edition.  <em>Decline and Fall</em> is Waugh's first novel published in 1928. It is based in part on Waugh's schooldays at Lancing College undergraduate years at Hertford College Oxford and his experience as a teacher at Arnold House in north Wales. It is a social satire that employs the author's characteristic black humour in lampooning various features of British society in the 1920s.</p><p>Reviews</p><p>Irresistible....One of Waugh's best.?New York Times Book Review</p><p>A savagely comic masterpiece.?Times Literary Supplement</p><p>A world of anarchic fantasy floodlit with a bland devastating brilliance....Waugh's people were of two classes both of whom he knew intimately: the giddy rich and adventurers of vast caddishness....The characters reeled their lunatic way with sublime insouciance or sublime rascality through a harlequinade ending in gruesome but hilarious calamity.?Charles J. Rolo Atlantic Monthly</p><p>Decline and Fall is that all-too-rare phenomenon a good nonsense novel. Its author has had the happy inspiration to take nothing seriously and least of all himself. The result is a book which makes more sense than most.?T.S. Matthews The New Republic</p><p>Surely one of the finest satirical novels of our time in whcih uplift religion romance and personal animus do not dissipate the satiric intention.?Ernest Jones The Nation</p>