Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh games the painter Christiane Ritter leaves

the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable home for a year with her husband on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen

Now classified as deserters

even as God abandons Britain and the fairies and old gods are returning

between inverted memoir and prose-poetry

From the seismic coming of Liverpool's the Beatles to a sex scandal that rocked the Tory government to the arrival at No 10 of Harold Wilson

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh games the painter Christiane Ritter leavesEvelyn Waugh's acidly funny novel of the Roaring Twenties, with an introduction by Simon JamesIn the years following the First World War a new generation emerges, wistful and vulnerable beneath the glitter. The Bright Young Things of twenties' Mayfair, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercise their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade whether promiscuity, dancing, cocktail parties or sports