Headline Britons paints a unique picture of British life in the 20th and 21st centuries by re-examining some of the country's most notable characters. Each book covers a five-year span, telling the stories of a number of people who, in that time, stood out among their contemporaries.

As the 1920s progressed and Britain tried to recover from the horrors of war, the country enjoyed a short postwar boom - seeing the development of household gadgets such as dishwashers, sterilisers and cigar lighters - but it did not last and soon unemployment grew.

Peter Pugh shows in this book that despite the `swinging twenties' being largely a myth, the decade was enlivened by mouldbreaking characters such as birth control pioneer Marie Stopes, father of the BBC John Reith, and Horatio Bottomley - perhaps the biggest business fraudster of all time.