Alwyn Turner is known for writing wittily about recent eras of British history, with popular culture placed to the fore. Here, he delves further back in time, to that poignant interlude between the death of Queen Victoria and the start of the first world war, when a sort of stodgy calm coexisted with a growing sense of insecurity that seems, in retrospect, entirely justified.
His description of the man who gave his name to the era provides a foretaste of his droll style. Edward VII was “a very different proposition” to his mother, Queen Victoria, “a well-upholstered yet less weighty figure, more cavalier and more public, like a latter-day Henry VIII, though with multiple mistresses rather than wives”. He could play the banjo, Turner informs us, having been taught by the black Canadian musician James Bohee. “In his world, ‘Diamond Jubilee’ tended to refer to a racehorse that he owned, winner of the Triple Crown in 1900…”
