This book could be subtitled, “Sh*t We Did One Summer.” And I have taken to calling it, “Sh*t I Read One Winter.”
An acquisition from a Little Free Library, I was delighted that I had stumbled on a portrait of England just before WWI that was, “As page turning as a novel,” (said one reviewer).
But, crikey, man. I have no idea what I just read.
I deeply respect the insane amount of research that Juliet Nicholson had to put into this work. But the sentences wander; I have no idea what the point of the majority of the paragraphs are; and the chapters are divided by time (Early June, Late June, etc) but jump back and forth so much in years, months, and weeks that I needed to construct a timeline to track it. I’m I’m still not clear!
Just as I sank my teeth into discussion of the “National Insurance Scheme” and the politics surrounding it, we’re off to talking about ladies’ hats. And when I’m enjoying the sartorial delights, we discuss someone’s hunting habits.
I’ve got whiplash, I tell ya!
There is one section that convinced me to continue reading it: discussion of the Labor organization and riots of 1911. It was clear and cohesive and thoroughly detailed so that I turned from page to page eagerly. Then I believe we got a breakdown of the exact costs, in pounds, of a funeral for a child in 1911 and the hardship it proved to the working poor. While I’m not unsympathetic, I fail to see the direct relevancy to Labor politics, and the author did not provide the segue or connection that would have led me there.
I believe this extensive research and eye for detail could have been employed to write a different book on the same subject- restructured and severely edited.
I very much appreciate the author’s word choices, though; I appreciate, on some level at least, any book I have to read while looking up words every page or three. ( )

2 stars because by the end, this book was draaaaaaagging and became a chore to finish. How pleased I was to find out the last quarter is all bibliography and notes! I now seen I've been "currently reading" this thing for over a month, which doesn't bode well for short nonfiction.

It is very slow and meandering, and abruptly shifts from topic to topic. (Which I was initially okay with, but didn't improve with exposure.) I've decided the author basically got 4 months' of 1911 newspapers, and then started summarizing the major stories in chronological order. Non-sequiturs abound, occasionally wrapped in purple prose descriptive language to, I guess, set the scene/atmosphere. We get random plops of minutiae (number of tennis matches held, e.g.) but even potentially interesting subjects are moved past without even a cursory examination at context, significance, or other wherefores. There aren't footnotes, so I was left wondering in places whether a person's inner feelings were sourced or fabricated.

I'm still unsure of the central thesis of the book, this perfect summer before England really got slapped around by history. For one thing, a lot of time is spent on sweltering misery and unrest. And sure, England is stepping into the shadow of the Great War -- but why 1911 and not 1912? 1913? Is it just the heat wave, which seemed mostly miserable (as heat waves generally are)?

In the end, I feel like I've read an only-sometimes interesting gossip column and will not be walking away with a deeper understanding of life in this period.

PS, the Kindle edition has terrible formatting for all the poems, lyrics, or other bits of verse, which are all squeezed into a column about 0.75" wide. Boo. ( )

Excellent, se lit comme un roman ( )

Very very readable and fun. A little heavy on the posh side and upper classes but interesting all the same. Great if you read a lot of fiction from this time period, which I do. ( )

5366. The Perfect Summer England 1911, Just Before the Storm, by Juliet Nicolson (read 16 Apr 2016) This is a kind of haunting study of the summer of 1911 in England. The reader feels as if he knows so much more than the people who are being discussed, since the forthcoming Great War is not mentioned but one is acutely aware that Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Winston Churchill, Rudyard Kipling, Raymond Asquith, George V, and all the others we are told about are going to undergo the trauma of the Great War. I confess I did not enjoy the book as much as I was reading it, even though one was fully aware of the great shadow the people did not see coming, but after I finished the book I look back on it as a poignant brooding account. ( )