Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London's Jazz Age
Fans of Evelyn WaughsVile BodiesandDecline and Fallwill recognize the glittering world of the Bright Young People, the London socialites of the 1920s who had their costume parties and other exploits celebrated (and excoriated) in the tabloid media. Taylor, a literary critic and biographer, acknowledges that this crowd—which included Cecil Beaton and Nancy Mitford—were the Britney Spears and Paris Hilton of their day, but doesn't belabor the point excessively. Taylors account is not so much a straightforward history as a bundle of thematic essays arranged chronologically; one chapter, for example, discusses the ways some gay Brights were able to avoid much of the repression prevalent throughout British society at the time, while another covers the themes of the fiction that came out of the scene. There are still plenty of juicy anecdotes to go around, although Taylor says that reports of drug-fueled orgies are exaggerated, and points out that Britain in the 1920s was a tightly regulated society. The text is enlivened by severalPunchcartoons from the period, vividly depicting the hold these rich young partygoers once held on the publics imagination.(Jan.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.