As the critic Mark Valentine has written: 'Michael Arlen wrote of the fast set of Mayfair and Belgravia, those who were to be termed the Lost Generation. His characters are doomed young war heroes still hungering for excitement; newly emboldened and abandoned heroines; raffish cads and outcasts from convention. All the tales are laced with fine irony and understatement, and a kind of bantering tone with the reader which was to become Arlen's hallmark.'...