Decline and Fall
An Oxford divinity student is sent down for indecent behavior after a drunken club dinner in which he was the victim, and takes the only employment open to a disgraced undergraduate: schoolmastering at a fraudulent academy in North Wales. A rich pupil's mother, the transatlantic business she declines to describe, and the reforming wing of the English prison service carry him along without his once raising an objection. Waugh's first novel established the deadpan cruelty and the innocent-in-freefall design that English comic fiction lived off for the next fifty years.
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- ↓ Scoop
- ↓ The Pursuit of Love
- ↓ Lucky Jim
- ↓ Vile Bodies
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Closest analogues
- 53% · 13 shared
- 53% · 12 shared
- 51% · 12 shared
- 49% · 13 shared
- 49% · 12 shared
- 49% · 12 shared