02969cam a22003493u 4500 76494 UtSlPG 20260610134754.0 m cr n 260607r20251926utu|||||o|||||||||||||| d 26005923 UtSlPG en iso639-1 PR Nichols, Beverley, 1898-1983 25 Twenty-five Salt Lake City, UT : Project Gutenberg, 2025 1 online resource : multiple file formats text txt rdacontent computer c rdamedia online resource cr rdacarrier Release date is 2025-07-13 Alan, Hannah Wilson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) "25: Being a young man's candid recollections of his elders and betters" by Beverley Nichols is a memoir written in the early 20th century. It offers spry, often irreverent portraits of prominent figures the author met while young—statesmen, poets, critics, society leaders—told with wit, candor, and an eye for revealing detail. Expect lively travel impressions, literary and political sketches, and a self-aware narrator measuring his youthful enthusiasms against the reputations of his “elders and betters.” The opening of this memoir follows a 19-year-old Nichols on a British Universities Mission to the United States near the end of the war, mixing shipboard vignettes and first impressions of New York with brisk encounters: a precise, weary Woodrow Wilson; a jovial, crowd-pleasing Taft; and the principled Elihu Root. He contrasts Harvard’s wealth with Britain’s austerity, witnesses premature Chicago Armistice celebrations, and notes the color of American media and millionaires—highlighted by J. P. Morgan handing him a strand of Keats’s hair and a Detroit paper inventing an interview. Back at Oxford, he sketches a cluster of literary greats: Masefield’s generosity and humility, Bridges’s leonine severity, Yeats’s dreamy otherworldliness, and the Sitwells’ sharp modernist mischief. He then captures G. K. Chesterton’s paradox-strewn stance on marriage, the Asquiths’ contrasting temperaments at a Liberal rally, Winston Churchill’s disciplined advice on writing and post-speech anxieties, and Horatio Bottomley’s raw, irresistible oratory. The section closes as he begins an exuberant, waspish portrait of Mrs. Patrick Campbell. (This is an automatically generated summary.) Originally published: New York: George H. Doran Company, 1926 Authors, English -- 20th century -- Biography Nichols, Beverley, 1898-1983 -- Childhood and youth https://archive.org/details/25beingyoungmans00nich https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76494 117219 117219