'The two most beautiful things in the world are Ivor's profile and my mind,' the great Noël Coward once said of Ivor Novello, his friend and collaborator and fellow household name. In Britain between the wars, the pair were arguably the two most popular entertainers in the country, and at the heart of the 'Bright Young Things' circle. Novello was a singer, composer and actor; Coward a writer with a string of hits, whose career took off in the 1920s when he ended up with four West End plays running at the same time. By 1929, according to Oliver Soden's recent biography , Coward was the best-paid writer in the world, earning the modern equivalent of £15 million a year.

So what do you do with your free time when life is good and you're a roaring success? For Coward, the answer was to enjoy

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