JAY GATSBY—the Oxford man, old sport—threw fabulous parties. ‘Every Friday, five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves,’ wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. A Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, transporting guests to and from the city, a full orchestra was installed and the night air was filled with cocktails, quickly forgotten introductions and splendid frivolity.
As Gatsby set about decorating his Long Island home like the World’s Fair, a party planner of a different ilk was preparing a London soirée. In Virginia Woolf’s, published in the same year, the eponymous host Clarissa famously decides to buy the flowers herself. The Great War had thrown a stone into the lake and the
