‘All the richness of your invention, the magical embroideries you fling around your characters cannot make me nostalgic about the world I knew in the 1920s. And yet it was the same world as you describe, or at any rate impinged on it. I was a debutante in 1922, & though neither smart nor rich went to three dances in historic houses, Norfolk House, Dorchester House, Grosvenor House & may have seen Julia Flyte. Yet, even in retrospect, it all seems very dull. Nobody was brilliant, beautiful, rich & owner of a wonderful home, though some were one or the other.
‘You see English Society of the ’20s as something baroque and magnificent on its last
