Bracketed by the catastrophes of the Great War and the Wall Street Crash, 1920s America was a place of drama, tension and hedonism. It glittered and seduced: jazz, flappers, wild all-night parties, the birth of Hollywood, and a glamorous gangster-led crime scene flourishing under prohibition. But the period was also punctuated by momentous events - the political show trials of Sacco and Vanzetti; the huge Ku Klux Klan march down Washington DC's Pennsylvania Avenue - and it produced a splendid array of writers, musicians and film stars, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Bessie Smith and Charlie Chaplin.

Lucy Moore is an author and broadcaster whose work includes the bestselling Maharanis: The Lives& Times of Three Generations of Indian Princesses. She has written for the Sunday Times, Observer, Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and has presented series for the BBC and Sky.