Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9364 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Review
`Taylor succeeds in conveying that the movement's real legacy was `an atmosphere...an outlook, a gesture, an essence'' --Evening Standard

Review
`his engaging portrait of another age'

Review
'very entertaining'

Customer Reviews

Fascinating Times
If we think that it's a new thing, the way that the gutter press and gossip mags now are obsessed with celebrity, we're wrong. The Bright Young People were there first. I bought this book after reading a review, because I'm interested in one particular person in one particular photograph. I found it enlightening and amusing. The Bright Young People that Taylor writes about were few; no doubt a lot of hangers on described themselves as Bright Young People during and after the event, but this book is about the epicentre, the small group of partygoers who started the trend then either took a back seat, left the country or were destroyed by it. The book concentrates on the essence of the movement, if that's what it was, the people at the heart of it, actual events and the people the newspapers wrote about. It doesn't truly describe a whole generation, just the ones who defined it and the waves they made.
Reading about them, I can see the influence they had on my working class, northern great aunt who gave up a good job as a cook to train as a secretary in London so she could go out dancing in the 1920s. She must have read about them in the press and wanted a part of it. She went on to run the factory that made rivets for Spitfires, then to help at a refugee camp in Italy, spoke four languages and judged dogs at Crufts. The Bright Young People seem to have unleashed a spirit of defiance of convention that spread amongst their generation then was crushed by mid century hardship and censorship. It makes me want to reread Waugh and watch Stephen Fry's Bright Young Things with a better understanding of their list of players.
There have always been upper class scoundrels, fritterers, debtors, drunks, sluts and fallen angels; for me, the way the press and contemporary novelists documented this particular group has the most relevance to present times.

a thoughtful view
I really enjoyed this book, which uses a large amount of original material - letters, diaries of the subjects and their families, as well as more public sources, to discuss this flamboyant and often tragic group in a very sensitive and thoughtful manner, with a good idea of the contemporary context and how this changed with the 1930s. Nice use of language, with something of a flavour of the times.

Portraits from an age of parties
Throughout much of the 1920s, Londoners had a front-row seat to the antics of a small group of socialites about town. These young men and women staged lavish parties, disrupted activities with scavenger hunts and other stunts, and provided fodder for gossip columnists and cartoonists. This group, dubbed the 'Bright Young People,' was fictionalized in novels, recounted in memoirs, and is now the subject of D. J. Taylor's collective history of their group.

An accomplished author, Taylor provides an entertaining account of the group. He describes its members - which included such people as Stephen Tennant, Elizabeth Ponsonby, Brian Howard, Bryan Guinness, and Diana Mitford - and the antics that often attracted so much attention. Yet his scope is also broadened to include people such as Cecil Beaton and Evelyn Waugh, socially on the fringe of the group and yet important figures whose interactions with them prove highly revealing. Through their works and the sometimes obsessive coverage they received on the society pages he reconstructs the relationships and the events that captivated the public's attention.

From all of this emerges a portrait of a phenomenon that was in many ways a unique product of its time. In the aftermath of the demographic devastation of the First World War, the 1920s was a decade that saw the celebration of youth, all of whom grew up in the shadow of a conflict that was the dominant experience of men and women just a few years older than them. The survivors lived in a world where the older generations were discredited and traditional social structures faced increasing economic pressures. In this respect, the Bright Young People represented a garish defiance of the old order and a celebration of life, yet one driven by an undercurrent of sadness and sense of loss.

Taylor's account is infused with both sympathy and insight. At points his narrative degenerates into descriptions of one party after another, when the people threaten to blur into a single generic stereotype, but he succeeds in conveying something of the flavor of the era. From the photos included, the reader can see the fun the young men and women smiling and hamming it up as they pose for the camera, but for what lay behind their expressions readers should turn to this book.