Anglo-American socialite, poet and journalist Brian Howard was BOTD in 1905. Born in Hascombe, Surrey to an upper-class American family, he was educated at Eton College, where he met Robert Byron, Harold Acton, and Oliver Messel. He attended Oxford University, where he developed a reputation as an aesthete and began publishing poetry in literary journals, befriending fellow writer Evelyn Waugh. He became a prominent member of the aristocratic social circle known as the Bright Young Things, with a friendship circle including Cecil Beaton, Tom Driberg, Hamish St. Clair-Erskine, L. P. Hartley, Gavin Henderson, Brian Howard, James Lees-Milne, Nancy and Tom Mitford, Richard, David and Olivia Plunket Greene, Edith and Osbert Sitwell and Stephen Tennant. An enthusiastic cross-dresser and notorious homosexual, he is thought to be the inspiration for Miles Malpractice in Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies and Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited. In 1929, he was involved in the “Bruno Hat” hoax, creating paintings that were exhibited as the work of a fictitious German painter. During World War Two, he took part in the Dunkirk evacuation and worked briefly for MI5. Dismissed in 1942 for incompetence, he was conscripted into the Royal Air Force and given a low-level clerk’s job, until being dismissed again in 1944. After the war, he and boyfriend Sam Langford travelled through Europe, and were expelled from Monaco, France, Italy and Spain for rampant alcoholism, drug abuse and brawling. Apart from occasional articles for the New Statesman, his literary output was stymied by his alcoholism and drug addiction, including an unsuccessful attempted to write a biography of the writer Norman Douglas. He is perhaps best known for the aphorism “Anybody over the age of 30 seen in a bus has been a failure in life” (attributed decades later to fellow Oxonian Tory Margaret Thatcher). After Langford’s accidental death, Howard committed suicide in 1958, aged 52. They were buried together in the Russian Orthodox Cemetery in Nice.