Introduction

Michael Arlen (1895-1956) was a literary shooting star among the smart set of the 1920s. Born to Armenian parents as Dikran Kouyoumdjian, he migrated to London during the First World War, changed his name and reinvented himself as a dapper man of letters. Determined to be more English than the English – or ‘every other inch a gentleman’, as a joke of the time had it – he became the self-styled chronicler of the Mayfair set, publishing a string of short story collections and novels, none more successful than The Green Hat in 1924 (later filmed with Greta Garbo). 

He's not much read nowadays, and it's hardly surprising. For what Arlen gave his readers was the illusion of reading about fashionable people leading ‘racy’ lives, all evoked in a language of baroque ornamentation - a winning formula that made him a millionaire, at least until taste started to move away from him in the 1930s.  Still, Arlen interests me because he had all manner of connections to other people whose reputations have held up better than his own. My forthcoming book Encounters with Michael Arlen will chart some of those relationships. Who knows? We may find familiar figures emerging in unfamiliar light.

(Click on photos to enlarge)