Book review: Constellation of Genius, By Kevin Jackson

1922, which saw the birth of Eliot's "Waste Land" and Joyce's Ulysses, also witnessed a "frenzy of innovation" across all the arts.

Zestful, erudite, high-spirited and readable, this chronicle of a year of creating dangerously takes the form of a day-by-day diary with merrily digressive notes.

Proust, Stravinsky, Fitzgerald, Chaplin, Woolf, Wittgenstein and dozens of others crowd its entertaining pages. Jackson both traces the course of this annus mirabilis of Modernism and - crucially - sets it fully in the context of turbulent world politics.