Simon Heffer: The Age of Decadence

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.