The Great Exhibition of 1851 aptly symbolized Britain's pre-eminence. But the ascendancy did not last, and a century and a half later Britain is forced to acknowledge her relative decline in many if not most spheres. Bernard Porter's history of the period traces the origins of most of the problems that confront the country today back precisely to that golden age of the 1850s and 1860s, dismissing fashionable views that attribute decline to the abandonment of Victorian values. He analyzes the artificiality of the conditions that in the 1850s and 1860s underpinned expansion, prosperity and stability, the burgeoning contradictions that liberal capitalism began to generate from the 1870s, with enormous political and social repercussions, and the growing tensions that resulted both in the so-called new imperialism of the 1880s and '90s and in Britain's semi-isolation in Europe for the best part of 100 years. Proper account is taken of short-term trends but full weight is also given to long-term developments and influences. We should look to the Victorian period not only for the roots, say, of the supersession of the Liberals by Labour after World War I, but also for an explanation of appeasement or for an understanding of the tension in the Conservative Party during the 20th century between its paternalist and free-market wings. Bernard Porter's study shows an awareness of the longevity of certain powerful characteristics in British life, and of their interrelatedness. His portrait fundamentally questions many of the conventional pieties that attach to the period.