Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties by Lucy Moore

Survivors of the war and the cataclysmic flu epidemic that immediately followed it felt themselves to be "both chosen and undeserving" as Lucy Moore's mesmerising book demonstrates.

America was propelled into the sexy razzle-dazzle of the Roaring Twenties by a desire to rejoice in the good fortune of survival but also by the urge to anaesthetise the guilt of outliving the dead. Like the champagne-immersed age she portrays, Moore's book effervesces with the detail of this fascinating story.

In the confusion of this looking-glass existence, nothing was quite what it seemed. The unprecedented creative energy displayed in the making of film, literature and music was undercut by the nation's mind-boggling corruption and extreme criminal behaviour.

Al Capone's business card bore the details of his official job as a second-hand furniture dealer. His rival, Dion O'Banion, an orchid connoisseur with a personality of "sunny brutality", ran his flower shop as a cover for his murderous bootlegging business. Embalming fluid and syphilis medicine were combined to make pricey, throat- burning cocktails. The fabulously foul language of the blues singer Bessie Smith jarred with her "hypnotic" singing voice. The sinister, hooded Ku Klux Klansmen spread their anti-Semitic, anti-black message while declaring support for "morality".

Presidents and newspaper barons worked hand in hand to suppress stories of political sleaze that they wanted to hide from their readers.

Despite the public's insatiable appetite for gripping stories about "motion pictures, baseball, prize fights, automobiles, dress, murder and divorce", there was a fragility about the decade. Crowds came to the cinema to laugh at, but also to identify with, the naive bewilderment with which Charlie Chaplin confronted post-war life.

In 1926 Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in an aeroplane made partly from piano wire, resembling, in his vulnerability, "a butterfly blown out to sea", existing only for the moment "in this strange unmortal space, crowded with beauty, pierced with danger".

Some willingly embraced a sense of glorious despair. Harry Crosby, a war-veteran banker and owner of a whippet with gold-painted nails, led a life of unparalleled extravagance before killing himself, suggesting that "suicide had become a cipher for a kind of glamorous vulnerability, for clear-eyed courage, aestheticism and decadence".

But hovering ever nearer to this indulgent world was the spectre of collapse. At the end of the decade, the day after the Chrysler Building had assumed its glittering position in the heart of New York, the financial markets went into free fall. Nearly 80 years after the crash of 1929, the cyclical nature of life may mean that "we too are hurtling towards some sort of catastrophe".

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

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.Here, Lucy Moore interweaves the most compelling stories of the people and events that characterized the decade to produce a gripping account of an often-overlooked period. In doing so, she demonstrates that the jazz age was far more than just 'between wars'; it was an epoch of passion and change - an age, she observes, that was not unlike our own. The world she evokes is one of effortless allure and terrifying drama: a world that was desperate to escape itself.