After the Victorians

Follow-up to the bestselling The Victorians in which A.N. Wilson tells the story of the 'Decline and Fall' of Britain. How did Britain decline? This is the question which A.N. Wilson seeks to answer in his masterly follow-up to The Victorians. In The Victorians the author told the story of Great Britain in her preeminence. It ended with Britain as the mightiest, richest nation on earth, possessed of a huge empire. That book, however, is full of forebodings and harbingers of disaster. This book tells the story of the decline of Britain - and with it, the decline of very many of the things which Victorian Britain stood for. Though it appeared that these things had merely taken a battering by the war against Hitler, in fact the seeds for their undoing had been there from the beginning. As in The Victorians, this book is a panoramic sweep taking in the well-known and the lesser-known, building up a portrait of the age as seen through the eyes of innumerable individuals. We see the First World War and the coming of Communist Revolution; the Spanish Civil War; the Second World War; the unstoppable growth of America as a dominant world power and the beginnings of the Cold War. in world politics. Alongside this is the story of the beginnings of Modernism - in Paris painting, in Vienna music and radical new philosophical systems of thought. A.N. Wilson visits the novelists, the philosophers, the poets and the painters to see what light they threw on the activities of the politicians, the scientists and the generals. Holding together military, political, social and cultural history, A.N. Wilson creates a panoramic view of the era which skilfully traces the sources and causes of the 'Decline and Fall' of Great Britain.