I’ve been reading this since I saw Stephen Fry’s film version a couple of weeks ago. It’s been some years since I originally read the book, and I think I was probably quite young and missed an awful lot of the references. The Penguin Classics edition is finely annotated and it’s a great fun book all round.
The film is actually remarkably close to the novel, with only the most inconsequential of sub-plots dropped. I’d have liked to have seen the party on an airship (which sounds great fun), but I can quite see why the Wesleyan film subplot was dropped.
Plenty more Waugh to work my way through in his centenary year.