SOURCE: In an introduction to Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh, Heinemann Educational Books LTD, 1966, pp. ix–xx.

In the following introduction to Decline and Fall, Hollis places the novella in the context of Waugh's life and writings.

The younger generation came in his last years to think of Evelyn Waugh as the very symbol of reaction. He appeared to them as a champion of a vanishing order, of whose survival he despaired. He wrote about peers and county families. He jeered at the crudities of Hoopers of lowly birth or of transatlantic adventurers like Rex Mottram who had invaded and annexed for themselves the privileges of British life. All foreigners were to him merely comic. In art he condemned the formlessness of modern painters. In literature he despised the poverty of vocabulary, the inattention to grammar, to coherence and to the structure of the sentence of the...