25

"25: Being a young man's candid recollections of his elders and betters" by Beverley Nichols is a memoir written in the early 20th century. It offers spry, often irreverent portraits of prominent figures the author met while young—statesmen, poets, critics, society leaders—told with wit, candor, and an eye for revealing detail. Expect lively travel impressions, literary and political sketches, and a self-aware narrator measuring his youthful enthusiasms against the reputations of his “elders and betters.” The opening of this memoir follows a 19-year-old Nichols on a British Universities Mission to the United States near the end of the war, mixing shipboard vignettes and first impressions of New York with brisk encounters: a precise, weary Woodrow Wilson; a jovial, crowd-pleasing Taft; and the principled Elihu Root. He contrasts Harvard’s wealth with Britain’s austerity, witnesses premature Chicago Armistice celebrations, and notes the color of American media and millionaires—highlighted by J. P. Morgan handing him a strand of Keats’s hair and a Detroit paper inventing an interview. Back at Oxford, he sketches a cluster of literary greats: Masefield’s generosity and humility, Bridges’s leonine severity, Yeats’s dreamy otherworldliness, and the Sitwells’ sharp modernist mischief. He then captures G. K. Chesterton’s paradox-strewn stance on marriage, the Asquiths’ contrasting temperaments at a Liberal rally, Winston Churchill’s disciplined advice on writing and post-speech anxieties, and Horatio Bottomley’s raw, irresistible oratory. The section closes as he begins an exuberant, waspish portrait of Mrs. Patrick Campbell.

25, by Beverley Nichols. Republished by OpenStories from Project Gutenberg eBook #76494.