Volume 37, Number 19 · December 6, 1990
The Death of 'Society'
By Noel Annan
The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy
by David Cannadine
Yale University Press, 813 pp., $35.00
David Cannadine has declined the invitation to spend the weekend at Brideshead. He intends to treat his aristocrats 'seriously rather than sentimentally,…to rescue the British upper classes from the endless (and mindless) veneration of posterity.' Their money, status, and power—the three keys to the stability of any governing class—are his concern. When, during the past hundred years, did their superiority fade, when did their wealth diminish, and how did political power, which for centuries had remained in their hands, slip through their fingers?
Review, 5597 words
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