THE AGE OF DECADENCE

By Simon Heffer

(Windmill £12.99, 912 pp) ‘AS A class, we did not like brains,’ remarked Daisy Brooke, one of the many mistresses of the future Edward VII. ‘As for money, our only understanding of it lay in the spending, not the making of it.’

Simon Heffer, author of this epic survey of Britain’s history from 1880 to 1914, observes that her astute summary of her class and era ‘betrays part of the reason for the decline of the old ruling class in the 20th century’.

His account of this period of social convulsion begins with ‘a nation in its pomp’.

Queen Victoria was on the throne, Gladstone was the prime minister and Britannia ruled the waves.

But change — profoundly unwelcome to the 10 per cent of the population who controlled 92 per cent of the nation’s wealth — was afoot.

Simon Heffer’s intricately detailed account ends with Britain diminished and on the brink of catastrophe.