Changed utterly

Some years ago Juliet Nicolson wrote an evocative and enjoyable study of the summer of 1911. She was far too intelligent to be taken in by the vision of unruffled and sunlit splendour propagated by those who wallow in nostalgia, but the picture that emerged was still one of self-confidence, complacency and a conviction that, for better or worse, nothing much was likely to change in the state of Britain.