Evelyn Waugh established his reputation as one of our leading novelists with his first novel, Decline and Fall, published in 1928. He continued to portray and satirize, with brilliant comic invention, the upper-class society of his own generation and maintained his high reputation to the last with The Sword of Honour, the final version of the trilogy Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, Unconditional Surrender published in 1965, a year before his death. Mr Hollis, in this sympathetic appreciation, suggests that Evelyn Waugh's study of the Catholic martyr, Edmund Campion, marked a turning-point in his literary development; from this study he learned the sundering nature of the Church's claims, and in his later novels he examines the effect of these claims on the Catholic living in modern, irreligious society.

Mr Hollis has written a number of books, including several on literary subjects, an analysis of economic problems, and Death of a Gentleman, published in 1943. His essay on G. K. Chesterton appears in this series.