Point Counter Point

In Twenties London, the writers, artists, wastrels and dilettantes who frequent Lady Edward Tantamount's Pall Mall parties are permanently engaged in pushing forward the moral frontiers of the age. Marjorie Carling has left her family to live with the writer, Walter Bidlake; the luscious but cold-hearted Lucy Tantamount is set on devouring every man in sight; the repulsive Spandrell insists on entertaining everyone with his accounts of how he debauches young girls; and even Lady Tantamount herself, long tired of her husband and his unwavering devotion to the study of newts, has taken a lover – the fashionable painter and expert taker of virginities, John Bidlake. Only Rampion is left to maintain standards of decency in this increasingly degenerate world…

Often described as a Vanity Fair for the Twenties, 'Point Counter Point' contains wickedly accurate portraits of D.H.Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Ottoline Morrell and Huxley himself.

"Huxley's style is at once dry and rich, intellectual and sensuous, scholarly and romantic. 'Point Counter Point' is extremely funny with passages of rich and gorgeous farce"
OBSERVER

"As a piece of satire, often brilliant, sometimes wise, 'Point Counter Point' is a monstrous exposure of a society which confuses pleasure with happiness, sensation with sensibility, mood with opinion, opinion with conviction and self with God"
GUARDIAN