The annual dinner of the Union league club of Brooklyn, February 12, 1908

It was a style that enabled him to impart a surreal quality to his satire while remaining unflappably aloof from the fray it reported. In Decline and Fall (1928), his narrator coolly introduces Oxford's Bollinger Club, an organization that draws its members from a rich vein of European lunacy. In a bemused tone, he reports of their "pouring into Oxford" for their irregularly held annual dinner: Epileptic royalty from their villas of exile; uncouth peers from crumbling country seats; smooth young men of uncertain tastes from embassies and legations; illiterate lairds from wet granite hovels in the Highlands; ambitious young bar-879- risters and Conservative candidates torn from the London season and the indelicate advances of debutantes; all that was most sonorous of name and title were there for the beano. The disparity between lineage and language in this catalog of decadence speaks for itself. There cannot be many other sentences that join «sonorous» with "beano." But then Waugh adds the patented Firbank touch ...»