<p>2024 Reprint of the 1947 Edition. &nbsp;<em>Decline and Fall</em> is Waugh's first novel published in 1928.&nbsp;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>