After World War I a brilliant and influential generation of young men deliberately overturned the values of their fathers and shaped the dominant cultural styles of the English-speaking world. In this book, the author traces the fate of these people, through the lives of Harold Acton and Brian Howard and some 40 of their friends - Waugh, Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Connolly, Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Beaton and Betjeman among them.