How and why the Twenties roared

Attempts to anatomise the Bright Young People of the 1920s have included Beverley Nichols’s The Sweet and Twenties (1958), Martin Green’s Children of the Sun (1977) and Humphey Carpenter’s The Brideshead Generation (1989). Osbert Sitwell called Nichols the first of the Bright Young People and Nichols claimed to be the last of them. D. J. Taylor suggests that this was not quite accurate, as there is still one survivor of that febrile group — I think he must mean Teresa (‘Baby’) Jungman, once the object of Evelyn Waugh’s desire, and now 100. Certainly Nichols was Bright Young Person in excelsis. He was clever-silly — the present-day equivalent might be the much nicer Gyles Brandreth, another past president of the Oxford Union, with his jokes, Fair Isle pullovers and teddy bears.

The Sweet and Twenties is a from-the-horse’s-mouth account of the Bright Young People (BYP), with vivid vignettes, some funny anecdotes and pen-portraits of fringe BYP who make no appearance in any of the later books, including Taylor’s.