Evelyn Waugh

"A wickedly witty and iridescent novel" (Time) from one of England's greatest satirists takes aim at the generation of Bright Young Things that dominated London high society in the 1920s. In the years following the First World War a new generation emerged, wistful and vulnerable beneath the glitter. The Bright Young Things of 1920s London, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercised their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade. In these pages a vivid assortment of characters, among them the struggling writer Adam Fenwick-Symes and the glamorous, aristocratic Nina Blount, hunt fast and furiously for ever greater sensations and the hedonistic fulfillment of their desires. Evelyn Waugh's acidly funny satire reveals the darkness and vulnerability beneath the sparkling surface of the high life.

Vile Bodies

Storm

He gave her his arm with a grace he had acquired many years ago; far away in his sunny little palace, under a great chandelier which scattered with stars of light like stones from a broken necklace, a crimson carpet woven with a pattern of crowned ciphers.

‘I don't know... it's only that I don't believe that really divine things like that ever do happen... I don't know why… Oh, I do like you so much to-night…’

In the train Nina said: ‘It's awful to think that I shall probably never, as long as I live, see you dancing like that again all by yourself.’

Then Archie said he was too sleepy to drive any more, so Adam changed places with him and lost the way, and they travelled miles in the wrong direction down a limitless bye-pass road.

and at last they all went to bed, very tired, but fairly contented, and oh, how they were bitten by bugs all that night.

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