You want to lose an empire? Because that's how you lose an empire!

From the Economist review of The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914 by Simon Heffer:

The ruling class became hoggishly self-indulgent: Mr Heffer lacerates Edward VII for his habit of sponging off his friends and debauching their wives. At the same time the intellectual elite—particularly the Bloomsbury set—took to ridiculing as prigs and bores the Victorian giants who had built up the economic and moral capital which they lived off.

Mr Heffer is himself a bit guilty of self-indulgence. He devotes too much space to subjects that catch his imagination, and says too little about an important part of Britain’s decadence: the way its obsession with the fripperies of aristocratic life diverted its attention from industry and commerce. He is silent about the United States despite the fact that these years saw America replacing Britain as the world’s biggest economy. There is surely no better illustration of Britain’s decadence than the entrepreneurial vigour remorseless predatory ambition [fixed that for you - TOF] of the likes of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. 

Yet Mr Heffer’s faults are minor compared with his virtues: He writes with such exuberance—indeed with such Edwardian swagger—that he leaves the reader looking forward to his next volume, on the first world war and the breakdown of the liberal world order.

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