Sir Vernon Bogdanor is best known as Britain’s leading constitutional historian, frequently heard on radio and television commenting on the latest questionable shenanigans at Westminster. But with this book—on which he must have been working quietly for years, if not decades—he has gone back to a much earlier period with a straight narrative history of the two decades leading up to the outbreak of the First World War.
It is explicitly conceived as a rebuttal of George Dangerfield’s brilliant, tendentious, but nevertheless influential book—first published in 1935— hence Bogdanor’s somewhat clumsy title. Dangerfield maintained that Britain on the eve of the Great War—far
