Edwardian Turn Of Mind

Samuel Hynes was born in Chicago in 1924 and was educated at the University of Minnesota and Columbia University. He has taught at Swarthmore College, Northwestern University and Princeton University. From 1943 to 1956, and again in 1952-3, he served as a pilot in the United States Marine Corps. His books include The Pattern of Hardy's Poetry, Edwardian Occasions and Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War II Aviator.The Edwardian Turn of Mind is the first volume of Samuel Hynes's trilogy of cultural histories covering the relationship between literature, theatre and public events during the first decades of the twentieth century. The others - A War Imagined and The Auden Generation - are also published by Pimlico.

Professor Hynes's book deserves to be set alongside the long-standing masterpiece on the latter part of the same period, George Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England... It is done so ruthlessly well that Edwardian England will never recover its air of golden repose before the deluge.