Four very different young men on the threshold of manhood are the central figures of the first in the series. One is the narrator, Jenkins, a budding writer. One is Templer, already a passionate womanizer. One is Stringham, aristocratic and restless. And the last is Widmerpool, as hopelessly awkward as he is intensely ambitious. Amid the fever of the 1920's and the first chill of the 30's, these four gain their initiations into sex, society, business and art, in fiction that explores every dramatically shifting level of an England desperately clinging to tradition even while being whirled irresistably onward by time and change.