Decline and Fall contraction of Edward Gibbon's "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." 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. Waugh read both Gibbon and Spengler while writing his first novel. 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
Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire as a popularization of Eysenck's articles and books criticizing psychoanalysis, and wrote that it was "not really meant for academic consumption." He criticized Eysenck's account of psychoanalytic therapy, writing that it bore little resemblance to modern psychoanalytic therapy, and wrote that Eysenck evaluated psychoanalysis using experimental evidence that was not methodologically adequate, or which in some cases actually provided weak support for psychoanalytic concepts such as repression. The psychologist Stephen Frosh described "Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire" as one of a number of books in which Eysenck acted as a "propagandist" for the view that psychoanalysis is unscientific