The Clique — Ferdinand Mount

'We're a group, like in Mary McCarthy', says one of the girls in the Clique. On the other hand, their style may remind you more of Evelyn Waugh's Bright Young Things. And their know-all panache has a touch of J. D. Salinger's quiz-kid Glass family. But The Clique is unmistakably a satire for its own time.

Gunby Goater, an up-and-coming reporter, 'hot or at any rate warmish' from the provinces, arrives in Fleet Street, keen for a taste of the fabulous Sixties. His assignment at the deathbed of the Last Great Englishman leads him into a series of adventures with the Clique, who alternately humiliate and delight him.

From the author of The Man Who Rode Ampersand, The Clique is a novel of exuberant wit trained sharply, though not without affection, upon a variety of phonies, conmen, topers and hacks.