The 'Roaring Twenties' they called it: a fun time to be alive. The birth of a brave new world. The jazz age of Fords, flappers, prohibition and bathtub gin. The movies, radio and consumerism have redefined the American dream; this is the dawn of our modern era. The machine is the future and supreme among machines is the aeroplane. The aeroplane – speed, glamour, communication – is the emblem of the Now. And a race is on to be the first to fly to the North Pole ... a perilous feat at the extreme edge of technological possibility in the primitive aircraft of the day. The main contestant: Roald Amundsen, who trudged first to the South Pole fourteen years before but is now fifty-two, bankrupt and tarnished. His principal competitor: Richard Byrd, Annapolis graduate and well-connected Virginian swell. To be the first to achieve the Pole would mean glory to one's country, reward and worldwide fame. To fail, once in the air, would mean almost certain death.

P.G. Wodehouse wrote that: 'the three essentials for an autobiography are that its compiler shall have had an eccentric father, a miserable misunderstood childhood and a hell of a time at his public school and I had none of these advantages'. Jeremy Scott had them all and then went on to:Have an Evelyn Waugh like youthPoison a battalion of the British Army (deliberately)Work as a gigolo (well, he tried, amongst the glitterati of New York)Get Edward Heath stoned on amphetaminesTangle with Lord Lucan; and work with David Bailey and Terry Donovan; and have Paul Newman's daughter fall in love with himLive with Peter Mayle, his best friend in Provence This is a wildly funny, hugely entertaining and, in part tragic, memoir of an accidental life spent in the fast lane (an E type Jaguar in fact) with everyone who was anyone in the 1960s and 1970s.

Why do women go for bastards? Not all women certainly, but an identifiable number of them - including almost all heiresses - find themselves drawn to, even marrying, a thoroughgoing wrong'un who steals their money, cheats on them and sometimes beats them up. Why, to these educated, rational, rich and otherwise balanced young women, is Mr Wrong irresistible? What is it about him, what is it in them? In short, what is the nexus between wealth, celebrity, sex and self-destruction? The Irresistible Mr Wrong is the serial biography of five women who were all serially married to the same man: Porfirio Rubirosa. From the Jazz Age to the mid-sixties, through Café Society, Hitler's Berlin, occupied Paris and the post-war fleshpots of the Jet Set, Jeremy Scott charts the glamour and tragedy of the wives and mistresses of the ultimate playboy.