In January 2003, James Bowman & Company marked the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the career of P. G. Wodehouse with a reading of three Jeeves stories. Now the group will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Evelyn Waugh with a reading from the author’s first novel, Decline and Fall.

The Times Literary Supplement called the book "A savagely comic masterpiece." Set in England in the mid-1920s, Decline and Fall tells the story of the hapless Paul Pennyfeather, expelled from his placid existence at Scone College, Oxford, to find work as a teacher at Llanabba Castle, a boys’ school in Wales. Pennyfeather’s adventure leads him from a Welsh public school to the fashionable world of 1920s London and an engagement to a rich and beautiful socialite. She takes him to the red-light district of a French port, where he is arrested and thrown into prison, from which he escapes and returns to Oxford.