Volume 44, Number 7 · April 24, 1997
Between the Acts
By Noel Annan
Bloomsbury Recalled
by Quentin Bell
Columbia University Press, 234 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Lutyens and the Edwardians: An English Architect and his Clients
by Jane Brown
Viking, 276 pp., $34.95
Edwardians: London Life and Letters, 1900-1914
by John Paterson
Ivan R. Dee, 352 pp., $27.50
On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and its Intimate World
by Peter Stansky
Harvard University Press, 296 pp., $27.95
Why do we have an inextinguishable desire to designate certain periods as an age or an epoch or an era? Is it a plot to impose order on that swirling movement of events and tendencies in history which would otherwise be unintelligible? Or is it a device to make our own times significant in contrast to what has gone before? Why do we talk so often of a golden age? When Ovid did so he was only giving authority to centuries-old mythology. Talleyrand declared that only those who had lived in the years before 1789 could know the true pleasure of life: and those in France who lived into this century referred to the first years of the twentieth century as la belle époque. Recently Eric Hobsbawm has discovered a new golden age of capitalism in the West between the years 1945 and 1973, when there was a period of extraordinary economic growth and when men and women came to believe that they could end the scourge of unemployment.
Review, 6649 words
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