Anything Goes

Bracketed by the catastrophes of the Great War and the Wall Street Crash, 1920s America was a place of drama, tension and hedonism. It glittered and seduced: jazz, flappers, wild all-night parties, the birth of Hollywood, and a glamorous gangster-led crime scene flourishing under prohibition. But the period was also punctuated by momentous events - the political show trials of Sacco and Vanzetti; the huge Ku Klux Klan march down Washington DC's Pennsylvania Avenue - and it produced a splendid array of writers, musicians and film stars, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Bessie Smith and Charlie Chaplin.

Lucy Moore was born in 1970 and educated in Britain and the US before reading history at Edinburgh. Voted one of the 'top twenty young writers in Britain' by the Independent on Sunday in 2001, her books include the bestselling Maharanis: The Lives & Times of Three Generations of Indian Princesses (Viking, 2004) and the acclaimed Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (HarperCollins, 2006). Anything Goes is published by Atlantic in 2008.