Introduction
"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
"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
"In fact, the whole of this book is really an account of the mysterious disappearance of Paul Pennyfeather, so that readers must not complain if the shadow which took his name does not amply fill the important part of hero for which he was originally cast." A story about the bizarre adventures of Pennyfeather that gets him kicked out of Scone College, Oxford for indecent exposure and eventually thrown into jail for "white slave traffic."; the book is a masterful satire of the English society of Waugh's time.
