Decline and Fall

David Bradshaw, John Bowen and Ann Pasternak Slater join Melvyn Bragg to discuss Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel Decline and Fall. Set partly in a substandard boys’ public school, the novel is a vivid, often riotous portrait of 1920s Britain. Its themes, including modernity, religion and fashionable society, came to dominate Waugh’s later fiction, but its savage wit and economy of style were entirely new. Published when Waugh was 24, the book was immediately celebrated for its vicious satire and biting humour.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• David Bradshaw 2 episodes
  Professor of English Literature at Worcester College, Oxford
• John Bowen 6 episodes
  Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of York
• Ann Pasternak Slater No other episodes
  Senior Research Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford

Reading list

• Letters of Evelyn Waugh
  Mark Amory (ed.) (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980)
• Evelyn Waugh: Fictions, Faith and Family
  Michael Brennan (Bloomsbury, 2013) Google Books →
• Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead
  Paula Byrne (HarperPress, 2009) Google Books →
• The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and his Friends
  Humphrey Carpenter (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989) Google Books →
• The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh
  Michael Davie (ed.) (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976) Google Books →
• Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of a Country Neighbour
  Frances Donaldson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968) Google Books →
• The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh
  Donat Gallagher (ed.) (Methuen, 1983)
• Evelyn Waugh: A Biography
  Selina Hastings (Vintage, 1995) Google Books →
• The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography
  Douglas Lane Patey (Blackwell, 1998) Google Books →
• Evelyn Waugh: The Complete Short Stories
  Ann Pasternak Slater (ed.) (Everyman, 1998) Google Books →
• Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years, 1903-1939
  Martin Stannard (Dent, 1986) Google Books →
• Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of an Artist
  F. J. Stopp (Chapman & Hall, 1958) Google Books →
• Evelyn Waugh: A Biography
  Christopher Sykes (Collins, 1975) Google Books →
• Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family
  Alexander Waugh (Headline, 2004) Google Books →
• A Little Learning: The First Volume of an Autobiography
  Evelyn Waugh (published first 1964, various publishers ) Google Books →
• No Abiding City: 1939-1966
  Evelyn Waugh (Dent, 1992)
• Vile Bodies
  Evelyn Waugh (published first 1930, various publishers ) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b01qmbsc

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qmbsc

Auto-category: 823.912 (British fiction–20th century)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. In May 1928, the Times Literary Supplement published a long review of a new book about Dante Gabriel Rossetti.