Wilson is Britain's equivalent of Americans like Paul Theroux — endlessly entertaining, often shocking, and incapable of writing a dull sentence. He's both scholarly and impossible to put down. He is unusual, too, in his special interest in modern Christianity (he himself once planned a career in the Church of England). His outstanding survey of the Victorian loss of faith, God's Funeral (1999), made the point that the unbelief of the modern British, and the continuing strength of Christianity in the US, is what most divides the two English-speaking nations today.
Christianity did make something of a surprise, albeit brief, come-back in 20th-century Britain, he asserts here, though many major figures such as Churchill had no religious faith, and ordinary men and women in the period he covers were far more likely to revere the royal family than they were to attend church or chapel.
Wilson is also a determined anti-Marxist, implying that the pragmatic and sensible English have always viewed Marxism and Fascism with equal derision. He gleefully points to the public wealth provided by successful industrialists such as Lord Nuffield (the Oxford car-manufacturer), and to the huge amount of simple human happiness created by the mass-production in the 20th century of labor-saving devices such as vacuum-cleaners, electric cookers and washing-machines. He considers the imperialist Rudyard Kipling unquestionably a great writer, but sees the mild-mannered E.M.Forster as having been over-estimated for covert left-wing, anti-imperialist reasons.
The book is also very funny in places, especially in its tart, dismissive asides. Wilson seems effortlessly able to extract the single most hilarious fact from a whole pile of volumes borrowed from the London Library (often more books than were officially allowed, he confesses). In reality he probably employed research assistants with instructions to seek out the most colorful paragraphs in each of a long list of books, and photocopy the relevant pages for his reference.
Lastly, Wilson is especially sympathetic to Edward VIII, the king who abdicated in 1936, seeing him as a representative of a talented younger generation that was systematically trampled on by their seniors in what turned out, partly as a result of this, to be an unusually dark and sinister era.
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