Adam Fenwick-Symes
Broke young author whose burnt memoirs set the whole machine going; wins and loses two fortunes, writes the Mr. Chatterbox gossip column by inventing its subjects, sells his claim on Nina for the price of a hotel bill, and ends the book asleep in a staff car on a battlefield.
Nina Blount
Adam's fiancee, conducted almost entirely by telephone; engaged, disengaged and re-engaged a dozen times, sold to Ginger, married to him, and by the last chapter pregnant by Adam and content to let her husband believe otherwise.
Agatha Runcible
The most reckless of the Bright Young People; strip-searched at Dover, the accidental cause of a government falling, briefly a record-breaking racing driver, and finally a concussion case racing round a phantom circuit in her head until she dies.
Ginger Littlejohn
Blustering, kind-hearted returnee from Ceylon, christened Ginger by everyone; buys Adam's claim on Nina, marries her, is called up at Christmas, and ends the book proud of a child that is not his.
Colonel Blount
Nina's father at Doubting Hall, cinema-mad and helplessly forgetful; signs a joke cheque as Charlie Chaplin, rents his house to a film company, loses his money buying the picture outright, and never works out which young man his daughter married.
Lottie Crump
Proprietress of Shepheard's Hotel, an unbudging survival of the Edwardian era who mislays names, prime ministers and corpses with equal serenity, and whose eventual bill sets the price of Nina.
Simon Balcairn
Impoverished earl and gossip columnist, barred from the party he must report; gatecrashes in a false beard, is exposed, files a magnificent invented story that paralyses the courts with libel actions, and kills himself in his gas oven.
Miles Malpractice
Lord Throbbing's brother, camp and cheerfully parasitic, living in his absent brother's house; inherits the Chatterbox column after Adam is sacked and has to leave the country before the final Christmas.
Archie Schwert
The new-money host whose savage party opens the social round, always circulating with a champagne bottle; ends the novel in prison as an undesirable alien.
Father Rothschild
Jesuit who knows everything about everyone, plots with cabinet ministers behind curtains, misidentifies a gossip writer as a spy, and alone diagnoses both the young generation's hunger for permanence and the war nobody has agreed to want.
Mrs. Melrose Ape
American revivalist touring with a troupe of girls dressed as angels, preaching hope for a collection; her London debut dies under one snort from Lady Circumference, after which she confirms Balcairn's lies and leaves for Oberammergau.
Margot Metroland
Formidable hostess whose party is the novel's social summit, and who recruits the prettier angels for what she calls jobs in South America.
Chastity
The angel who takes that offer; shipped to Buenos Aires, then dragged across the war by one army after another under a new name each time, and found asleep in the General's car in the last chapter.
The drunk Major
Nameless recurring figure who takes Adam's thousand pounds, actually places the winning bet, and spends the book almost handing over the thirty-five thousand; reappears in the final chapter as a General who has lost his division and writes the cheque when money has ceased to mean anything.