Anything Goes

After falling for silent film (and award magnet) The Artist, I realised I'd bought but not read a biography of the Twenties last year. Lucy Moore's 2008 Anything Goes opens with a line that's far longer than anything I'd usually quote but goes some way to explaining why I'm enjoying this book so much.

Here goes:

"What made me decide to write about the 1920s in America was an increasingly powerful sense of recognition. So many aspects of the Jazz Age recall our own; political corruption and complacency; fear of outsiders; life-changing technologies; cults of youth, excess, consumerism and celebrity; profit as a new religion; astonishing affluence and yet a huge section of society unable to move out of poverty. Perhaps we too are hurtling towards some sort of catastrophe...After all, as history so often reminds us, there is nothing new under the sun"

From the terrible charm of gangster Al Capone and his ice cream coloured suits to the endless partying that reminds me of nothing so much as "with pleasure", the line that gives the game away in The Artist, it's a brilliant, timely read.