‘Roy Hattersley,’ said Becky, tilting her head on one side to read the spine of the thick red book I had brought away with me to the house party. ‘The Edwardians. Are there four more depressing words in the language?’
Now, that’s not fair. He may be a bit of a windbag, but he’s our windbag, and he has obviously done a good deal of work on a book about a lively period in our history. His tour d’horizon of the Edwardian age takes in 360 degrees of horizon.
It is largely a work of summary, coloured by its author’s partisanship, and given original flavour by quotes from the unpublished diaries of three different Edward- ians: a Duke of Devonshire; a children’s nanny with a family in Ascot; and young Rowland Evans, ‘schoolboy son of a Bradford Nonconformist minister’.
Hattersley’s contention is that most of us think of the years from 1900 to 1914 as a sunny and inconsequential interlude of cricket jerseys and drawing-room comedies: a ‘long and leisurely afternoon’ leading, unawares, towards the chimps’ tea parties of Passchendaele and the Somme.
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