The Edwardians

US: St. Martin's Press, 2005. Paperback. Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Edwardian Britain has often been described as a golden sunlit afternoon---p ersonified by its genial and self-indulgent King. In fact, modern Britain w as born during the reign of Edward VII, when politics, science, literature, and the arts were turned upside down. In Parliament, the peers were crushed for the first time since Magna Carta. Irish nationalists and suffragettes took politics out on to the streets. H ome Rule and Votes for Women were delayed, not precipitated, by the First W orld War. Great parliamentary stars such as Lloyd George and Winston Churchill typifi ed an era in which personalities dominated the headlines of the new tabloid newspapers. It was the age of Rolls and Royce, Scott and Shackleton, Edwar d Elgar, Shaw, the Pankhursts, and Mrs. Alice Keppel, whose social life was reported without mention of her relationship with the King. The theater of ideas superseded drawing room dramas. Novelists of genius--- from Henry James to D. H. Lawrence---produced a masterpiece each year. A Lo ndon gallery caused a sensation with an exhibition of "Postimpressionists." Edward Elgar was the first English composer for two hundred years to stand comparison with the continental European masters. In sport, Victorian chiv alry was replaced with unashamed professionalism. Man flew for the first time and the motorcar became a common sight on city streets. Physicists examined the structure of the atom and philosophers disputed the traditional definition of virtue. The churches tried, wi.