Huxley's celebrated fictional portrait of London intellectuals in the 1920s includes such characters as the decadent painter John Bidlake and his son Walter, Walter's hapless wife Marjorie Carling, the vile fascist politician Everard Webley, the thoroughly unpleasant Maurice Spandrell, and a revolutionary named Illidge. These characters are offset by Huxley's ideal couple, Mark and Mary Rampion, who provide the moral force in a novel that is often frighteningly cynical. (They may or may not be based on Huxley's friends D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield.) This satirical and unsparing vision of a particular world at a particular time is perhaps Huxley's greatest work.