Britain in the Great War

Staring at God

The latest volume in Simon Heffer's critically acclaimed history of modern Britain

A brilliant history: The first serious and really wide-ranging history of the Home Front during the Great War for decades. Scholarly, objective and extremely well-written. A masterclass . . . that ought to be taught in schools. It is filled with surprising revelations . . . and empathy. Heffer's eye for the telling detail is evident on almost every page.

Gloriously rich and spirited . . . colourful, character-driven history . . . it zips along, leavened by so many wonderful cultural and social details.

Fresh insights, vast scope and caustic judgement. Possibly the finest, most comprehensive analysis of the home front in the Great War ever produced. Compelling reading.

Enlightening . . . Robust opinion, an eye for telling detail and a gift for bringing historical figures alive . . . An epic, ambitious book.

Staring at God is a vast compendium of atrocious political conduct. Refreshing . . . [The book]’s length is due to the author’s enormous enthusiasm. A trenchant history.

The book stands out for its humanity as well as its breadth and detail

The book I read with the most profit this year was the absorbing Staring at God: Britain in the Great War . . . A particular strength of the book is Heffer's understanding - as befits a former deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph - of the role of the press; this was the great age of newspaper proprietors

An epic history of Britain. It is every bit as good as its two predecessors. Illuminating. *****

[An] admirable book . . . ambitious in its scope, content and approach . . . Heffer's understanding of the personalities and the issues is comprehensive

Simon Heffer’s latest hefty volume of 20th-century history tackles the high politics and muddy misery of the First World War.

This is a very detailed and well-researched book about the First World War . . . The author graphically describes the austerity of life at home.

Simon Heffer was born in 1960. He read English at Cambridge and took a PhD in modern history at that university. His previous books include: Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, Power and Place: The Political Consequences of King Edward VII, Nor Shall My Sword: The Reinvention of England, Vaughan Williams, Strictly English, A Short History of Power, Simply English and High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain. In a thirty-year career in Fleet Street, he has held senior editorial positions on The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, and is now a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph.

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'A brilliant history: The first serious and really wide-ranging history of the Home Front during the Great War for decades. Scholarly, objective and extremely well-written. Filled with surprising revelations and empathy. Heffer’s eye for the telling detail is evident on almost every page. A remarkable intellectual and literary achievement.' – ANDREW ROBERTS, TELEGRAPH 
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A major new work of history on the profound changes in British society during the First World War 
 
The Great War saw millions of men volunteer for or be recruited into the Army, their lives either cut short or overturned. Women were bereaved, enlisted to work in agriculture, government and engineering, yet still expected to hold together homes and families. But while the conflict caused social, economic and political devastation, it also provoked revolutionary change on the home front. 
 
Simon Heffer uses vivid portraits to present a nuanced picture of a pivotal era. While the Great War caused loss on an appalling scale, it also advanced the emancipation of women, brought notions of better health care and education, and pointed the way to a less deferential, more democratic future. 
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'Staring at God is a vast compendium of atrocious political conduct. Refreshing. A trenchant history.' – GERARD DE GROOT, THE TIMES 
 
'A magisterial history' – MELANIE MCDONAGH, DAILY MAIL 
 
‘Gloriously rich and spirited […] it zips along, leavened by so many wonderful cultural and social details.’ – DOMINIC SOUTHBROOK, SUNDAY TIMES 
 
‘Ambitious in its scope, content and approach. Masterly.’ – CHARLES VYVYAN, STANDPOINT 
 
‘Fascinating stuff.’ – SPECTATOR 
 
‘Possibly the finest, most comprehensive analysis of the home front in the Great War ever produced.’ – LITERARY REVIEW 
 
‘Every bit as good as its two predecessors. Illuminating.’ – EXPRESS 
 
‘Absorbing’ – NEW STATESMAN

Britain 1880 to 1914

The Age of Decadence

A major new work by one of Britain’s leading journalists and most acclaimed historians

A riveting account of the pre-First World War years . . . A gloriously rich history . . . Balanced and judicious . . . The Age of Decadence is an enormously impressive and enjoyable read.

Heffer has given us a magnificent account of a less than magnificent epoch . . . Vital and energetic.

The Age of Decadence is an impressively well-constructed book . . . Heffer weaves his wonderfully diverse strands of inquiry into a devastating critique of prewar Britain . . . Heffer’s criticism of unbridled traditionalism is devastating and convincing. It’s also disturbingly relevant to the world in which we live.

Mr Heffer combines a scholar’s command of the primary literature with a journalist’s eye for detail. He writes with admirable sensitivity about both music and literature: a better account of Elgar or Arnold Bennett would be hard to find. He does a brilliant job of exposing the rot beneath the glittering surface of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain . . . He writes with such exuberance – indeed with such Edwardian swagger – that he leaves the reader looking forward to his next volume.

A rich social history of a time when progress and cruelty collided . . . Heffer provides a painfully relevant story about the dangerous decadence of traditionalism.

Monumental . . . [Heffer writes] with much illuminating detail to carry the story forward.

[An] intelligent, richly detailed and comprehensive survey.

The Age of Decadence will be consulted with pleasure by the general reader as well as by the student . . . So well written that one would not have it a page shorter.

The rise of the middle class is just one of the grand narratives that runs through its pages, along with Irish Home Rule, women’s suffrage and a taste of Elgar . . . A really riveting read.

This is scholarship of a high order: an impressive ability to synthesise wide-ranging sources and provide a cogent, readable narrative is spiced by the confident opinions, not to say barbs, of the newspaper columnist.

Covers as much ground as the miles of Edwardian housing spreading out along the new Tube lines of London, and is as packed with pompous politicians as the House of Commons was on a busy day in the debate about Irish Home Rule. The fact that I now know about all those things shows how rewarding the book is.

An account of the thirty years or so leading up to the First World War . . . [Heffer] is interested in exploring the political and social tumult of the time, which really can’t be exaggerated

Simon Heffer’s Age of Decadence covers a period of British history – 1880 to 1914 – that few would at first sight equate with decadence. As the British Empire reached its height, stiff upper lips seemed more in evidence than the louche trappings of decadence. Yet Heffer makes a convincing (and beautifully written) case that those upper lips were in fact quivering away, as the world went clanking towards its destruction.

Heffer’s history of fin-de-siècle Britain is full of decadent delights . . . Richly and wittily written.

There is a view, commonly held, that grand narrative histories are a thing of the past . . . This view is mistaken, as Simon Heffer proves happily and beyond doubt with his latest book.

There is much to enjoy in this long account, packed with detail.

Beautifully written and packed with intriguing facts, [The Age of Decadence] is an engaging read that will appeal to historians and general readers alike . . . Superb.

A social, political and cultural history of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, carefully examining the contradictions of the period . . . Highly readable.

[Heffer] has really excelled himself with this epic study of Britain in the years before the First World War. Majestic in its scope, meticulous in its scholarship, compelling in its thesis and stylish in its prose, his heavyweight book challenges the familiar historical tale of confidence and swagger and presents the age in a more complex, sombre light . . . The author has done an extraordinary amount of research, unearthing a wealth of new material from archives. . . . It is impossible to read this magnificent work without gaining a deep new understanding of a unique and troubled age.

[One of] the best historical books to gift others this Christmas.

Heffer has turned himself into one of Britain’s most accomplished and formidable men of letters . . . Heffer is a genuine intellectual with a shelf of books to his credit.

An epic survey . . . Simon Heffer’s intricately detailed account ends with Britain diminished and on the brink of catastrophe.

‘A riveting account of the pre-First World War years . . . The Age of Decadence is an enormously impressive and enjoyable read.’ Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times 
 
‘A magnificent account of a less than magnificent epoch.’ Jonathan Meades, Literary Review 
 
The folk-memory of Britain in the years before the Great War is of a powerful, contented, orderly and thriving country. She commanded a vast empire. She bestrode international commerce. Her citizens were living longer, profiting from civil liberties their grandparents only dreamt of, and enjoying an expanding range of comforts and pastimes. The mood of pride and self-confidence is familiar from Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches, newsreels of George V’s coronation and the London’s great Edwardian palaces. 
 
Yet things were very different below the surface. In The Age of Decadence Simon Heffer exposes the contradictions of late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. He explains how, despite the nation’s massive power, a mismanaged war against the Boers in South Africa created profound doubts about her imperial destiny. He shows how attempts to secure vital social reforms prompted the twentieth century’s gravest constitutional crisis and coincided with the worst industrial unrest in British history. He describes how politicians who conceded the vote to millions more men disregarded women so utterly that female suffragists’ public protest bordered on terrorism. He depicts a ruling class that fell prey to degeneracy and scandal. He analyses a national psyche that embraced the motor-car, the sensationalist press and the science fiction of H. G. Wells, but also the Arts and Crafts of William Morris and the nostalgia of A. E. Housman. And he concludes with the crisis that in the summer of 1914 threatened the existence of the United Kingdom – a looming civil war in Ireland. 
 
He lights up the era through vivid pen-portraits of the great men and women of the day – including Gladstone, Parnell, Asquith and Churchill, but also Mrs Pankhurst, Beatrice Webb, Baden-Powell, Wilde and Shaw – creating a richly detailed panorama of a great power that, through both accident and arrogance, was forced to face potentially fatal challenges. 
 
 
‘A devastating critique of prewar Britain . . . disturbingly relevant to the world in which we live.’ Gerard DeGroot, The Times 
 
‘You won’t put it down . . . A really riveting read.’ Rana Mitter, BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking

An A-Z of Avoidable Errors

Simply English

The author of the best-selling Strictly English wages war on bad English

Fascinating ... a trove of riveting facts.

It’s a bracing read. Heffer takes no linguistic prisoners. This is a useful, well-constructed and often absorbing book.

Simply English is much more readable than a reference book has a right to be ... basically Simply English is rather good.

Advice that will change for ever the way you use certain words.

Easy to use and terribly hard to put down ... Essential.

Simon Heffer was born in 1960. He read English at Cambridge and took a PhD in modern history at that university. His previous books include: Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, Power and Place: The Political Life of King Edward VII, Nor Shall My Sword: The Reinvention of England, Vaughan Williams, Strictly English, A Short History of Power, Simply English and High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain. In a thirty-year career in Fleet Street, he has held senior editorial positions on The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, and is now a columnist for The Daily and Sunday Telegraphs.

In his best-selling Strictly English Simon Heffer explained how to write and speak our language well. In Simply English he offers an entertaining and supremely useful A–Z guide to frequent errors, common misunderstandings and stylistic howlers. What is the difference between amend and emend, between imply and infer, and between uninterested and disinterested? When should one put owing to rather than due to? Why should the temptation to write actually, basically or at this moment in time always be strenuously resisted? How does one use an apostrophe correctly, ensure that one understands what alibi really means, and avoid the perils of the double negative? 
 
With articles on everything from punctuation to tabloid English to adverbs and adjectives, Simply English is the essential companion for anyone who cares about the language and wants to use it correctly.

The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain

High Minds

An ambitious exploration of the making of the Victorian age and the Victorian mind and will delight readers of similar titles such as A. N. Wilson's The Victorians.

Heffer has written a stunning overview of the great and the good – and the not-so-good – of Victorian society and of the changes which a largely benevolent capitalism brought about.

High Minds is worthy to the task: serious, scholarly, grand and determined...an excellent guide to the aesthetics of the age.

[I]t is really a whole bookshelf of books. If you want a succinct volume on the Clarendon Commission and the debates on education, there is a not-so-slim volume embedded here. There is another on the desperate case of the formidable Caroline Norton and the battle to give women rights...another on the great philanthropists; another on crime and punishment; another (wonderfully detailed and compelling) on the Great Exhibition and the foundation of Albertopolis; another on the sewers; a terrific essay on the struggle between Gothic and Italianate architecture; and of course plenty of politics...This is a great sweeping, confident book, demonstrating the self-same energy and passion as do the Victorian heroes Heffer celebrates. It is a magnificent achievement.

[A] stimulating and thoroughly enjoyable book...[Heffer] is sometimes tendentious but never unreasonable, writes notably well and provides an admirable introduction to a period of history which many of us will think that we know quite well but have never considered from this point of view before.

High Minds is partly social history, partly a history of ideas. It is the personalities involved that contribute such liveliness to this assured and magisterial narrative.

There is something enormously refreshing about reading a history book with such a passionate moral agenda, as well as one with such scope, energy and intellectual clarity. High Minds is a book Heffer’s heroes would have loved – and perhaps there is no higher compliment than that.

[A]bsolutely riveting . . . As dramatic as he is bold, as droll as he insightful, Heffer keeps his foot firmly on the throttle throughout, ensuring the narrative never flags.

Magnificent... [A] gloriously detailed narrative.

This important book provides a detailed overview of 40 years in the Victorian era in which British life was transformed beyond recognition ... The book demonstrates a depth of research … letting the evidence speak for itself ... this pacy account will have you gripped.

A rich, readable and unashamedly moralistic anti-Strachey.

A wholehearted celebration of [the Victorians'] refusal to accept the inevitability of suffering and injustice … This is a serious book about the lasting value of seriousness. Engaging, and finally moving, it is a remarkable achievement.

Simon Heffer was born in 1960. He read English at Cambridge and took a PhD at that university in modern history. His previous books include: Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, Nor Shall My Sword: The Reinvention of England, Vaughan Williams, the highly successful Strictly English and A Short History of Power. In a career of nearly 30 years in Fleet Street he has written columns for and held senior positions on the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.

Simon Heffer's new book forms an ambitious exploration of the making of the Victorian age and the Victorian mind. 
 
Britain in the 1840s was a country wracked by poverty, unrest and uncertainty, where there were attempts to assassinate the Queen and her prime minister, and the ruling class lived in fear of riot and revolution. By the 1880s it was a confident nation of progress and prosperity, transformed not just by industrialisation but by new attitudes to politics, education, women and the working class. That it should have changed so radically was very largely the work of an astonishingly dynamic and high-minded group of people – politicians and philanthropists, writers and thinkers – who in a matter of decades fundamentally remade the country, its institutions and its mindset, and laid the foundations for modern society. 
 
It traces the evolution of British democracy and shows how early laissez-faire attitudes to the lot of the less fortunate turned into campaigns to improve their lives and prospects. It analyses the birth of new attitudes to education, religion and science. And it shows how even such aesthetic issues as taste in architecture were swept in to broader debates about the direction that the country should take. In the process, Simon Heffer looks at the lives and deeds of major politicians, from the devout and principled Gladstone to the unscrupulous Disraeli; at the intellectual arguments that raged among writers and thinkers such as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, and Samuel Butler; and at the 'great projects' of the age, from the Great Exhibition to the Albert Memorial. Drawing heavily on previously unpublished documents, he offers a superbly nuanced insight into life in an extraordinary era, populated by extraordinary people – and how our forebears’ pursuit of perfection gave birth to modern Britain.

The correct way to write ... and why it matters

Strictly English

The Telegraph's master English stylist shows how it's done

An impassioned case for correct English, full of practical advice

Every one of us who gasps at the use of English in the papers each morning or harrumphs on turning on the radio will find much to applaud

I have spent several productive hours reading Strictly English

His evidently strong feelings about his subject, fluently expressed, make this book lively and engrossing

The Holy Grail of grammar ... It is a delight to read and learn from this book

Heffer's polemic in favour of grammatical precision is an important and persuasive one

Anyone who writes for a living, or who wants to write well, could benefit from a few hours spent with Heffer's amusing and clearly organised book

In a career of more than 25 years in Fleet Street Simon Heffer has written columns for and held senior positions on the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. It was while associate editor of The Daily Telegraph that his emails to staff lamenting their lapses in English became an internet cult, and led to the writing of this book. He read English at Cambridge and holds a PhD from that university in history. His previous books include: Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, Nor Shall My Sword: The Reinvention of England and Vaughan Williams.

"Be in no doubt: the beer was drunk but the man drank the beer." 
 
"We must avoid vulgarities like 'front up'. If someone is 'fronting up' a television show, then he is presenting it." 
 
Simon Heffer's incisive and amusingly despairing emails to colleagues at the The Daily Telegraph about grammatical mistakes and stylistic slips have attracted a growing band of ardent fans over recent years. Now, in his new book Strictly English, he makes an impassioned case for an end to the sloppiness that has become such a hallmark of everyday speech and writing, and shows how accuracy and clarity are within the grasp of anyone who is prepared to take the time to master a few simple rules. 
 
If you wince when you see "different than" in print, or are offended by people who think that "infer" and "imply" mean the same thing, then this book will provide reassurance that you are not alone. And if you believe that precise and elegant English really does matter, then it will prove required reading.

An A to Z of Assaults On Our Language

Scarcely English

Simon Heffer was born in 1960. He read English at Cambridge and took a PhD in modern history at that university. His previous books include: Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell, Power and Place: The Political Consequences of King Edward VII, Nor Shall My Sword: The Reinvention of England, Vaughan Williams, Strictly English, A Short History of Power, Simply English and High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain. In a thirty-year career in Fleet Street, he has held senior editorial positions on The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, and is now a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph.

The English language has evolved throughout its history, and usually for good reasons. However, in recent years, egged on by social media and the ubiquity and velocity of the internet, it has been subject to some grave assaults. There appear no longer to be any rules, in an era when, thanks to the web (another word to have changed its meaning) everyone can be a published author, completely unedited and unregulated. This often has dire consequences for the English tongue. 
 
Simon Heffer's A to Z runs though a whole litany of common confusions ('flaunt' and 'flout', 'imply' and 'infer', 'uninterested' and 'disinterested'), unidiomatic English ('fed up of', 'focus around', the use of 'impacted' in such construction as 'the loss impacted him badly'), and lazy expressions (these days every extended activity is an '-athon', every scandal is a 'Something-gate'). It bemoans some truly awful neologisms, 'infotainment' and 'funwashing' among them. And it registers the horror of those of us who do not believe that you can answer the question 'How are you?' with the words 'I'm good'. 
 
Trenchant and sprinkled with dry wit, Scarcely English is both a chamber of horrors of bad and lazy English and a plea for accuracy, clear thinking and elegance.

Simon Heffer

Britain Between the Wars

‘An epic new history . . . a work of epic scholarship, breathtaking range, and piercing originality’ Daily Express 
‘An astonishing achievement of narrative history . . . I think the word is "magisterial".’ Spectator 
‘Excellent, thorough, detailed and combatively argued.’ Sunday Times______________________________________ 
 
Sing As We Go is an astonishingly ambitious overview of the political, social and cultural history of the country from 1919 to 1939. 
 
It explores and explains the politics of the period, and puts such moments of national turmoil as the General Strike of 1926 and the Abdication Crisis of 1936 under the microscope. It offers pen portraits of the era's most significant figures. It traces the changing face of Britain as cars made their first mass appearance, the suburbs sprawled, and radio and cinema became the means of popular entertainment. And it probes the deep divisions that split the nation: between the haves and have-nots, between warring ideological factions, and between those who promoted accommodation with fascism in Europe and those who bitterly opposed it. 
__________________________________________'Magisterial . . . an extraordinary achievement.’ Literary Review 
‘A masterful portrayal of political, social and cultural upheaval between the wars.’ Daily Mail

Simon Heffer

Sing As We Go

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