The Coterie

The Coterie was a fashionable and famous set of English aristocrats and intellectuals of the 1910s, widely quoted and profiled in magazines and newspapers of the period. It adopted the hostile description as a "corrupt coterie".

Many were the children of The Souls. Its members included: Lady Diana Manners, the most famous beauty in England; Duff Cooper who became a Conservative politician and a diplomat; Raymond Asquith, son of the Prime Minister and a famed barrister; Maurice Baring; Patrick Shaw-Stewart, a managing director of Barings Bank and war poet; Nancy Cunard and her friend Iris Tree; Edward Horner and Sir Denis Anson.^[1] World War I destroyed the original Coterie, taking the lives of Horner, Shaw-Stewart and Asquith.

They were best known for their extravagant parties and were also associated with such places as the Café Royal and The Cave of the Golden Calf, London's first nightclub.

Notes

References

• Mackenzie, Jeanne. The Children of the Souls: A Tragedy of the First World War. London : Chatto, 1986.
• Lambert, Angela. Unquiet Souls: The Indian Summer of the British Aristocracy, 1880-1918. London : Macmillan, 1984.