After The Victorians, A. N. Wilson, c. 2005

From the death of Queen Victoria, 1901, to the dawn of the Cold War, 1950s.

WWI
Russian Revolution
Britain's role in shaping the Middle East
WWII

If the Victorians were involved in regional wars and colonialism; the post-Victorians were involved in world wars that some might argue were outgrowths of what the Brits had done in the 19th century.

Thirty-seven chapters.

528 pages.

Prologue

• the author's generation.
• author's father too young to have served in WWI; his aunt had served as a nurse in France, WWI
• the General Strike; his father was a mounted policeman
• his mother recalled two happy years in Koblenz from 1929 - 1931
• his mother's father, in Koblenz, denounced his teenaged sons for enjoying a book called Mein Kampf
• WWII -- author's sister and brother born during WWII
• father was a colonel in the Royal Artillery
• all of that before the author was born
• the Great Winter of 1947

Chapter 1: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus Kaiser

• the story of the families and the rulers of Great Britain, Germany, and Prussia and familial events that led up to WWI; a psychological examination
• begins with Dr Sigmund Freud, 1856 - 1939
• The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900, a a most extraordinary and revolutionary text
• took his family to live in London for the last year of his life, following the Anschluss, the joining of Germany and Austria into a Great German, Grossdeutschland
• his books burned in Berlin in 1933
• his books burned in Vienna in 1938
• Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, succeeded him mother Queen Victoria; upon her death; January 22, 1901; becomes King Edward VI; 59 years old
• his father had died of a "cold," and then "pneumonia," at age 42
• his elder sister was Crown Princess of Prussia
• his nephew was the German Emperor Wilhelm II
• Mentions Henry James, writing from his club, the Reform; to mourn Queen Victoria
• German Emperor Wilhelm II was born to Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, herself named Victoria and Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia
• Vicky was quite as savage and violent towards her son the future Kaiser as Queen Victoria has been to her son Bertie (eventually King Edward VI)
• Wilhelm II considered himself more English than German

Chapter 2: Rupees and Virgins

• the British expedition to find/destroy Russian settlement/spies in Lhasa, the monkish capital of the mountainous land, Tibet
• introduction of the Maxim gun, sighted to 2,500 yards; could fire 450 rounds/minute; in Tibet in 1904, they had never seen a wheeled carriage, let alone a machine gun
• military members of the expedition: Gurkha infantry, some Sikh pioneers, and British gunners of the Norfolk Regiment
• machine gun invented by Sir Hiram Maxim; adopted into the British army in 1889
• expedition to counteract the Russian danger to the British Empire in India

• flashback to 1901 - 1902: the Boer War in South Africa

Chapter 3: The Land

• the age of bicycling and the great outdoors

Chapter 4: The Accursed Power

• 1906: the year in which Edwardian Britain would see as the crucial year -- the great Liberal landslide

Chapter 5: Love in the Suburbs

• the spread of suburbs brought perhaps unforeseen emotional restrictions
• human beings have, historically, devised strict rules for sexual conduct
• a very interesting chapter

Chapter 6: God -- and the Americans