The novel was written at Plas Dulas in north Wales, while staying with the archaeologist Richard MacGillivray Dawkins[2] and teaching at Arnold House, nearby in the village of Llanddulas.

The title alludes also to the German philosopher Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918–1922), which first appeared in an English translation in 1926 and which argued, among other things, that the rise of nations and cultures is inevitably followed by their eclipse.

[4] Waugh's satire is unambiguously hostile to much that was in vogue in the late 1920s, and "themes of cultural confusion, moral disorientation and social bedlam ... both drive the novel forward and fuel its humour".

[8] Modest and unassuming theology student Paul Pennyfeather falls victim to the drunken antics of the Bollinger Club and is subsequently expelled from Oxford for running through the grounds of Scone College without his trousers.

[9][10] The Guardian, in 1928, praised the book as "a great lark; its author has an agreeable sense of comedy and characterisation, and the gift of writing smart and telling conversation, while his drawings are quite in tune with the spirit of the tale".

[11] Arnold Bennett hailed it as "an uncompromising and brilliantly malicious satire"[12] and the writer John Mortimer called it Waugh's "most perfect novel ... a ruthlessly comic plot."

It was dramatised again in 2015 by BBC Radio 4, with Kieran Hodgson as Pennyfeather, Emilia Fox as Margot, Tom Hollander as Otto, John Sessions as Grimes, Alex Lawther as Peter, James Fleet as Prendergast and Geoffrey Whitehead as Fagan.

In 2017 the BBC produced a three-part TV dramatisation[15] starring Jack Whitehall as Paul Pennyfeather, David Suchet as Dr Fagan, Eva Longoria as Margot Beste-Chetwynde, Douglas Hodge as Captain Grimes, and Vincent Franklin as Mr Prendergast.