History: Roy Hattersley loves to write and relishes research, particularly when it yields the illuminating anecdote. In this large thematic survey of the years between 1900 and the outbreak of war in 1914, we are saved from tedium in some arid chapters by a good story.
Queen Victoria, for example, was buried with not only Prince Albert's dressing-gown in her coffin, but with John Brown's photograph and a lock of his hair in her left hand. Her inadequate eldest son did little to enhance his reputation during his very short reign.
Three unpublished diaries - of a duke, a children's nanny, and a Bradford schoolboy and engineering apprentice - give Hattersley's book some felicitous help in setting the scene.
Irish readers will find much of interest, as "the Irish question" was central to parliamentary negotiations all through the period. Hattersley reminds us that "English politicians have never understood Ireland and the Irish". Indeed, he remains slightly bemused by the interaction of Yeats, Maud Gonne, the Gore-Booths with Irish nationalism. He details how "there was a very gradual dawning of the realisation that Home Rule would be taken out of the House of Commons' hands and on to the streets of Ireland, North and South".
The question of women's suffrage gets a long and mostly sympathetic treatment, though the author thoroughly dislikes both Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. Upon the outbreak of war in 1913, Christabel, "with the insensitivity which is so often characteristic of the champions of great causes", proclaimed that the war was "God's vengeance upon people who held women in subjection". Winston Churchill, in one of his many appearances throughout the book, got it wrong on votes for women. On hearing of Christabel's first commitment to prison, he hoped "the quiet and seclusion may sooth her fevered brain". Hattersley does not record whether Churchill ever publicly regretted his stance on the issue.
Hattersley's own political background is evident in the detailed - too detailed? - sections on the rise of British trade unionism, and the beginnings of the Labour Party ("Half way through the long Edwardian afternoon, the working classes awoke"). It was a long awakening.
The emergence of real democracy was one of the many battlegrounds of Edwardian England. Change was fought tooth and nail, and the battles are recounted with relish - in politics, sport, the Church of England (what fear there was of "popery and all Romanising practices"), the media, education and the world of culture (Henry James, E.M. Forster, and the shocking D.H. Lawrence) - all of them fascinating. A curious chapter on schoolboy heroes and their glorious failures lays bare the disastrous mismanagement and bad planning which led to the deaths of people such as Scott of the Antarctic. As they forced down sickening mixtures of chocolate, tinned peas and cheese - because all the food packs had burst and mixed together - and contemplated their fighting dogs and dying horses, did they wonder if things could have been better done?
The strong economy and industry of Germany - "the America of those years" - stimulated great efforts to rival that increasingly dangerous country in air travel, shipbuilding and motor design and manufacture. Such was British pride that when the recriminations started about the Titanic tragedy, they concerned neither the design of the ship nor the capacity of the lifeboats - that would have been to admit shortcomings. As the world moved inexorably towards war, the tension and dislike between Kaiser Wilhelm II and his uncle, Edward VII, was a bizarre feature of international politics as the German's behaviour became more and more erratic.
Churchill's last appearance in the book comes as the Cabinet gloomily contemplates war as the midnight, August 3rd, 1914 deadline passes. The prime minister's wife, Mrs Asquith, also present, wrote later: "Winston dashed into the room, radiant, his face bright, his manner keen . . . you could see that he was really happy." That brash exuberance was totally out of place in the eyes of his Cabinet colleagues.
Hattersley, however, closes this study on a positive note. Despite the war and the 1929 slump, the people of Britain were, he believes, on a path of political, social and cultural improvement which was the important legacy of the Edwardians: "The Land of Hope and Glory was moving irresistibly into the modern world."
Gemma Hussey is director of the European Women's Foundation, author, and former minister for education
The Edwardians by Roy Hattersley Little, Brown, 481pp. £25