Summary: Melvyn Bragg and his guests 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, and it was immediately celebrated for its vicious satire and biting humour. Melvyn Bragg is joined by David Bradshaw, Professor of English Literature at Worcester College, Oxford; John Bowen, Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of York and Ann Pasternak Slater, Senior Research Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford.
