Foreword
F
What kind of a hat was it? Well ‘It was bright green, of a sort of felt, and bravely worn; being, no doubt, one of those that women who have many hats affect pour le sport.’
So begins the extraordinary tale of The Green Hat, ‘A romance for a few people’ and one of the most deliciously exquisite representations of 1920s London that I know. ‘I saw it for the first time (writes the Author) on the eve of my removal from one residence in London to another…’ and from those opening lines we are drawn into the era of cigarette cases and cocktails and jazz at the Ritz, long lean dresses and Hispano Suiza cars… All rendered in prose so sculpted and mannered the book is like a beautifully wrought box of a thing – with its own particular edges and smoothnesses, its own particular cut gl
