The Age of Decadence

A riveting account of the pre-First World War years … A gloriously rich history … Balanced and judicious … The Age of Decadence is an enormously impressive and enjoyable read. – Dominic Sandbrook * Sunday Times *
Heffer has given us a magnificent account of a less than magnificent epoch … Vital and energetic. – Jonathan Meades * Literary Review *
Magisterial. – Sam Leith * Spectator *
The Age of Decadence is an impressively well-constructed book … Heffer weaves his wonderfully diverse strands of inquiry into a devastating critique of prewar Britain … Heffer’s criticism of unbridled traditionalism is devastating and convincing. It’s also disturbingly relevant to the world in which we live. * The Times *
Mr Heffer combines a scholar’s command of the primary literature with a journalist’s eye for detail. He writes with admirable sensitivity about both music and literature: a better account of Elgar or Arnold Bennett would be hard to find. He does a brilliant job of exposing the rot beneath the glittering surface of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain … He writes with such exuberance – indeed with such Edwardian swagger – that he leaves the reader looking forward to his next volume. * The Economist *
A rich social history of a time when progress and cruelty collided … Heffer provides a painfully relevant story about the dangerous decadence of traditionalism. – Books of the Year * The Times *
Monumental … [Heffer writes] with much illuminating detail to carry the story forward. * Spectator *
[An] intelligent, richly detailed and comprehensive survey. – Allan Massie * Standpoint *
The Age of Decadence will be consulted with pleasure by the general reader as well as by the student … So well written that one would not have it a page shorter. – Vernon Bogdanor * Daily Telegraph *
The rise of the middle class is just one of the grand narratives that runs through its pages, along with Irish Home Rule, women’s suffrage and a taste of Elgar … A really riveting read. – Rana Mitter, BBC Radio 3 * Free Thinking *

Simon Heffer was born in 1960. He read English at Cambridge and took a PhD in modern history at that university. His previous books include Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, Power and Place: The Political Consequences of King Edward VII, Nor Shall My Sword: The Reinvention of England, Vaughan Williams, Strictly English, A Short History of Power, Simply English and High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain. In a thirty-year career in Fleet Street, he has held senior editorial positions on The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, and is now a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph.

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