The Edwardian era lasted little more than a decade and, rather confusingly, Edward VII himself died four years before it ended. Alwyn Turner makes a convincing case, nonetheless, that it was a time of considerable change - a busy transitional period between the old world and the new. As in his previous books about late-twentieth century Britain, Turner is keen to show how the events and concerns of the time were reflected in popular culture, so we get a great deal about the music hall, the rise of the popular press, cinema, children’s comics, and the popular novelists and playwrights of the day. One of the things that struck me is that the division between ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ fiction had yet to be created (modernism hadn’t quite got going), so you had writers like H. G. Wells and G. K. Chesterton producing novels that were both serious and entertaining, and read by a large audience.

The past may well be a foreign country but, in many respects, Edwardian England seems remarkably like the current model. There was the death of the then longest-reigning monarch in history and her succession by a son who was, as Turner says of Edward, ‘a very different proposition’: a division between those who thought Britain should play a role in the wider world beyond the Empire, particularly in Europe, and the insular little Englanders of the title; widespread concern about immigration; political and social unrest; serious rioting on the streets; panics about the morally deleterious effects of new technology (What the Butler Saw machines were all the rage); the spectacular fall in 1906 of a long-serving and tired Conservative Government beset by splits and divisions. There was even a Labour Party leader called Keir. The parallels with the present pile up remorselessly throughout the book, but Turner allows the reader to make the connections.

He’s particularly good with the biographical vignette which is emblematic of the period - the roguish yet very popular politician Horatio Bottomley, and the strange case of the tragic heiress Violet Charlesworth. This is excellent popular history - wide-ranging, insightful, and fun to read. ( )