Capturing cultural mood—that is one of the great skills of Simon Heffer’s painterly pen. The sharpness of his writing is scarcely encapsulated by the blurbs that draw attention to his books. Instead, it is in his journalism of cultural perception—on writers, composers, poets, and others—that he reveals his insight, the vigor of his moral conservatism, and the strength of his searching understanding of aesthetic judgment.

These winning traits are found in his new book, The Age of Decadence, the successor to High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain (2013). In his new opus, he captures the tensions “beneath the swagger,” notably, “the social storm before the international catastrophe.” In doing so, he offers a similar insight to one provided recently by David Cannadine: “the reality was that much of Britain’s nineteenth-century ‘greatness’ rested on insecure and transient foundations.” And it is understandable that, at least in conversation, many have compared and contrasted Heffer’s book with Cannadine’s Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800–1906(2017). While both their authors are highly intelligent and perceptive commentators, they write from dissimilar backgrounds and adopt distinctive voices. Cannadine engages most successfully with the politics of his subject. Indeed, there is a form of homage to his first tutor, J. H. Plumb. Cannadine also considers Britain’s relation to the world abroad, as befits a scholar with positions at Princeton, Oxford, and London. And he adopts the British rather than the English approach, the latter of which, as he has