When Theodore Gumbril hits upon the notion of designing a type of pneumatic trouser (a comfort to all travellers, indispensable to first-nighters, the concert-goers friends) to ease the discomfort of the sedentary life, he decides the time has come leave his position as a housemaster in a boys public school and seek his fortune in the metropolis. But post-First-World-War London seems to be gripped by a fever of hedonism. Gumbril is soon caught up in the delirious world of aesthetes extraordinaire Mercaptan, Casimir Lypiatt and the thoroughly civilised Myra Viveash, and finds his burning ambitions are beginning to lose their urgency... A contemporary commentator coined the word futilitarian to describe the type of desultory, pleasure-seeking intellectual Huxley pinned so mercilessly to the literary map in Antic Hay. Wickedly funny and deliciously barbed, the novel epitomises the glittering neuroticism of its decade.

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