The myth of the golden years before the First World War, brought to a tragic and unforeseen end by that war’s outbreak, lingers on despite all the evidence produced by subsequent historians to show how dangerously shaky were the foundations of that apparent stability. In 1936 when The Strange Death of Liberal England was published, George Dangerfield’s picture of the years from 1910 to 1914 was startlingly original. It was also astonishingly well written, which was probably one of the reasons why it made very little stir at the time, since so serious a reassessment might not have been expected to find its expression in such apparently genial mockery and in passages of quite such bravura prose.