Comedies

This set collects six of Waugh's comic novels: Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust, Scoop, and Put Out More Flags. The books follow a public-school innocent among crooks, the Bright Young Things of 1920s London, colonial adventurers in an African state, a country-house husband, a nature journalist dropped into a made-up war, and the phoney war of 1939. Recurring targets are fashionable society, the press, colonial administration, and the English country house as it fails. Tone is satirical and often cruel; plots turn on mistaken identity, bad marriages, and institutions that keep running after their purpose has gone. The volumes are separate novels, not one continuous story.

Bound in cloth printed with an individual multicoloured image. Dark brown six-volume slipcase titled in gold.