Simon Heffer: The Age of Decadence

Aug 09, 2018, 12:36 PM

In this summer rewind, Sam Leith talks to the journalist and historian Simon Heffer, originally released in October 2017.

He is the author of the magisterial The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880-1914. The second part in his trilogy of books about the Victorian and Edwardian ages, it works to explode the myth that the pre-war years were an endless Merchant Ivory Summer’s afternoon. They talk about imperial decline, savage industrial unrest and aristocratic complacency… and how one writes a history of the years before 1914 without talking about the roots of the First World War.