Book description
Bright Young People/ Making the most of our youth/ They talk in the
Press of our social success/ But quite the reverse is the truth.
[Noel Coward]
The Bright Young People were one of the most extraordinary youth
cults in British history. A pleasure-seeking band of bohemian
party-givers and blue-blooded socialites, they romped through the
1920s gossip columns. Evelyn Waugh dramatised their antics in Vile
Bodies and many of them, such as Anthony Powell, Nancy
Mitford,Cecil Beaton and John Betjeman, later became household names.
Their dealings with the media foreshadowed our modern celebrity
culture and even today,we can detect their influence in our cultural life.
But the quest for pleasure came at a price. Beneath the parties and
practical jokes was a tormented generation, brought up in the shadow
of war, whose relationships - with their parents and with each other -
were prone to fracture. For many, their progress through the 'serious'
Thirties, when the age of parties was over and another war hung over
the horizon, led only to drink, drugs and disappointment, and in the
case of Elizabeth Ponsonby - whose story forms a central strand of
this book - to a family torn apart by tragedy.
Moving from the Great War to the Blitz, Bright Young People
is both a chronicle of England's 'lost generation' of the Jazz Age,
and a panoramic portrait of a world that could accommodate both
dizzying success and paralysing failure. Drawing on the writings and
reminiscences of the Bright Young People themselves, D. J. Taylor has
produced an enthralling social and cultural history, a definitive
portrait of a vanished age.
D. J.Taylor is a novelist, critic and acclaimed biographer of William
Thackeray and George Orwell (both available in paperback). His
Orwell: The Life
won the Whitbread Biography of the year for 2003. His most recent books
are the Victorian novel
Kept: A Victorian Mystery
(Chatto, 2006) and
The Corinthian Spirit: on the decline of
Amateurism in Sport
(Yellow Jersey, 2006). He is married with three children and lives in
Norwich.
