One of the Bright Young Things in that brilliant and stimulating era between the wars, Alec Waugh remembers 1931 as being a year of firsts. It was the year he attended his first garden party, the year he made his first transatlantic phone call, the year he became a member of the MCC. But it was also a year that marked the end of one epoch and the beginning of another, far less frivolous.

Nostalgic for the best of that time, Alec Waugh recalls the writers he knew and met here and in America - Somerset Maugham, A J Cronin, John O'Hara, Thurber and Dorothy Parker. Here is an insight...

A rich tale centred around the lives of Marjorie Fairfield, a beautiful and penniless young woman who is the mistress of a wealthy business man; and the symbolically named Ransom Heritage, one of the many young men who were cast adrift after the First World War ended and who has been abruptly deprived of a sense of purpose, ambition and hope.

Around these young people and their circle whirls the carefree society of fashionable post-war London - a raucous, glamorous and perhaps slightly shrill world of cocktails and nightclubs, tea dances and illicit tete-a-tetes.

Waugh...