Evelyn Waugh is one of the pre-eminent English novelists of the 20th Century. This collection comprises six of his finest works, dramatised by award-winning writer Jeremy Front.

Decline and Fall
Paul Pennyfeather, an earnest, scholarly Oxford student, knows nothing of 1920’s high-life – until one night he encounters The Bollinger Club… This darkly comic romp set in the early Jazz Age stars Kieran Hodgson, John Sessions, Emilia Fox and Tom Hollander.

Brideshead Revisited
During the Second World War, a disillusioned Captain Charles Ryder finds himself posted to Brideshead Castle: the scene of the happiest years of his life and the beginnings of his friendship with Sebastian Flyte. A classic tale of life, love and a forgotten era, starring Ben Miles, Jamie Bamber, Anne-Marie Duff and Toby Jones.

Scoop
Hapless journalist William Boot is mistakenly sent to report on a war in Africa, where he finds love and ends up in the middle of a revolution… Waugh’s celebrated satire of newspaper life stars Rory Kinnear and Tim McInnerny.

Sword of Honour (The Waugh Trilogy)
This three-part dramatisation of Waugh’s satirical masterpiece follows the comic adventures of Guy Crouchbank during World War II. In Men at Arms, Guy is scarred by a broken marriage and searching for a purpose to live. When war breaks out, he feels he may have at last found a cause worth fighting for. Officers and Gentlemen sees Guy sent home in disgrace following a misbegotten raid in Dakar. But his next posting takes him somewhere totally unexpected… In Unconditional Surrender, Guy is beginning to lose his idealism about the war – but his military career is revived with selection for a mission to Italy.
Guy Crouchback is a man scarred by a broken marriage, searching for a purpose in a modern world, when war breaks out he feels he may have at last found a cause worth fighting for.

Directed by Sally Avens

Waugh’s trilogy of WWII novels mark a high point in his literary career. Originally published as three volumes: Officers and Gentlemen, Men at Arms and Unconditional Surrender they were extensively revised by Waugh, and published as the one-volume Sword of Honour in 1965, in the form in which Waugh himself wished them to be read. They are dramatised for the Classic Serial in seven episodes.
This is a story that continues to delight as we follow the comic and often bathetic adventures of Guy Crouchback. Witty and tragic, engaging and insightful, this work must be counted next to ‘Brideshead Revisited’ as Waugh’s most enduring novel. Like Brideshead, Waugh drew heavily upon his own experiences during WWII. Sword of Honour effortlessly treads the line between the personal and the political – it is at once an indictment of the incompetence of the Allied war effort, and a moving study of one man’s journey from isolation to self fulfilment. His adventures are peopled by colourful characters: the eccentric, Apthorpe, one-eyed, Ritchie-Hook, promiscuous, Virginia Troy. At the centre of the novel is Guy for whom we never lose our sympathy as he emerges from his adventures bowed but not broken. From Dakar to Egypt, the Isle of Mugg to the evacuation of Crete, tragedy is leavened by Waugh’s acerbic and farcical comedy.