Simon Heffer was born in 1960. He read English at Cambridge and took a PhD in modern history at that university. His previous books include- Moral Desperado- A Life of Thomas Carlyle, Like the Roman- The Life of Enoch Powell, Power and Place- The Political Consequences of King Edward VII, Nor Shall My Sword- The Reinvention of England, Vaughan Williams, Strictly English, A Short History of Power, Simply English and High Minds- The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain. In a thirty-year career in Fleet Street, he has held senior editorial positions on The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, and is now a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph.
A riveting account of the pre-First World War years . . . A gloriously rich history . . . Balanced and judicious . . . The Age of Decadence is an enormously impressive and enjoyable read. -- Dominic Sandbrook * Sunday Times * Heffer has given us a magnificent account of a less than magnificent epoch . . . Vital and energetic. -- Jonathan Meades * Literary Review * Magisterial. -- Sam Leith * Spectator * The Age of Decadence is an impressively well-constructed book . . . Heffer weaves his wonderfully diverse strands of inquiry into a devastating critique of prewar Britain . . . Heffer's criticism of unbridled traditionalism is devastating and convincing. It's also disturbingly relevant to the world in which we live. * The Times * Mr Heffer combines a scholar's command of the primary literature with a journalist's eye for detail. He writes with admirable sensitivity about both music and literature: a better account of Elgar or Arnold Bennett would be hard to find. He does a brilliant job of exposing the rot beneath the glittering surface of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain . . . He writes with such exuberance - indeed with such Edwardian swagger - that he leaves the reader looking forward to his next volume. * The Economist *