THE PERFECT SUMMER: ENGLAND 1911, JUST BEFORE THE STORM.

New York: Grove Press, 2007. 290 pp, 9 1/4" H. B&w photographs, reproductions. "Before the Great War tore England apart and changed the way people lived forever, there was the glorious summer of 1911, when the country seemed full of promise and blissfully unaware of the coming storm. (The author's) portrait of that sunlit season, transports us to a time nearly a century ago to experience the sights, sounds, and feelings of a society on the brink of a changing world. Drawing on rarely seem sources from royal and private archives, Nicolson reconstructs the lives of many key individuals and events in brilliant novelistic detail. The summer began as Londoners filled Westminster Abbey to see George V crowned king. The elite class bounded from one house party to the next, outdoing each other in lavish amusements. That season's golden girl was Lady Diana Manners, who, as far as the press was concerned, could do no wrong. The Russian Ballet premiered at Covent Garden and was 'utterly utterly'. Audiences gasped at Nijinsky's gravity-defying leaps and in their fashion adopted the bright reds and purples of 'The Firebird'. High summer boasted extreme heat and cracks in the idyll began to show. A bulter was writing a potentially best-selling tell-all memoir, anticipating that those above stairs would be anxious to know what those below were saying about them. In early August, the trade unions struck with full force: thousands walked out of underpaid factory jobs and the dock and transportation workers' union paralyzed the shipping industry and the national rail, causing severe food shortages. The charismatic leader Ben Tillet thought the country on the verge of collapse, while the Home Secretary Winston Churchill confided to his diary, 'all the world is changing at once.' Nicolson brings the brittle beauty of that portentous summer into crisp focus, giving us both an unusual insight into the varieties of existence, from Queen to suffragette, as well as the story of how, day by cloudless day, a nation began to lose its innocence." Previous owner's name in ink at the top of the front free endpaper, some tiny dents on the edges of the boards, three tiny corner bumps, wrinkling at the top/bottom of the spine, slight lean to the spine. Dust jacket has wrinkling at the top/bottom of the spine and flap-folds, light wrinkling at the top edge, light fading to the spine colour.. Not Signed. Third Printing.. Hard Cover. Very Good/Very Good.