After Queen Victoria, the flood

Alwyn Turner writes early on that Little Englanders is ‘an attempt to take the temperature of the nation as it emerged from a century that had dominated the world and was beginning – whether it knew it or not – a long process of decline’. Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps because the high (and low) politics of the years from 1901 to 1914 – the Edwardian era continues for four years after the death of the eponymous sovereign, up to the lights going out all over Europe in August 1914 – have been so exhaustively covered in recent years, he tells his readers that he will draw heavily on

popular literature, on the songs of the music hall and on the newspapers. Consequently it might sometimes seem trivial: the administrators of Empire feature less than the headliners at the Empire, Leicester Square, and the politicians that appear are those who were embraced by the public.