Anything goes

by Lucy Moore

This is an exhilarating portrait of the era of invention, glamour and excess from one of the brightest young stars of mainstream history writing. Bracketed by the catastrophes of the Great War and the Wall Street Crash, the 1920s was a time of fear and hedonism. The decade glittered with seduction: jazz, flappers, wild all-night parties, the birth of Hollywood, and a glamorous gangster-led crime scene forced to flourish under prohibition. It was punctuated by terrifying events - the political show trials of Sacco and Vanzetti; the huge march down Washington DC's Pennsylvania Avenue by the Ku Klux Klan - and produced a glittering array of artists, musicians and film stars, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Bessie Smith to Charlie Chaplin.