Jim - well I'm glad I didn't upset you too much! :-) The fascination with that period of history, for me, is precisely because of... Well. Once you've got to 1900, you've got something that looks like the modern world. The infernal combustion has been invented. The aeroplane will turn up shortly. Electric lighting, telephone, and "wireless" are all starting to have an impact...

Yet the social structure remains a monolith. Yes, there is agitation for change; not just Marx, Engels, et al, but organised labour starting to flex muscles. And don't necessarily think unions here - the striking London matchgirls (pun pretty much unavoidable!) in 1888, who worked for Bryant & May, springs to mind. It's WWI that actually is the mortal wound to the old social system.

Partly because of the (slightly mythical) lost generation. A lot of people who sneer about the upper classes, the generals, etc, don't seem to realise that it was the "gentlemen" who suffered most. Officers led from the front, and died in disproportionate numbers. Because "the done thing" was more ingrained into them than anyone else. The "public schoolboys" of whom we now speak contemptuously were already in the army as officers, or joined up, became officers, and... died... There went the "assumed / presumed" leadership of the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years.

Partly, of course, it's because WWI was an enormous leveller. So many of the "underclasses" came back from the war knowing that, actually, they were just as good as those they had always thought of, automatically, as their superiors. And that's the mistake that so many "moderns" make, hence my "especially WWI!" earlier.

"How could they..." "Why did they..." WWI was the break point, the fault line. There, the old social system suddenly fractures, and therein lies the problem. From the 50's onwards, people have viewed it as a modern world. From outside the head, it is; from inside the head it isn't. If you see what I mean. And a whole generation of bad history, the 50's to 70's, has created a huge amount of myth around WWI that is difficult to shift. I'm no John Terraine (apologist for the generals), but Alan Clark MP did admit that the "Lions led by Donkeys" thing was something he simply made up. Yet it's taken as gospel!

Anyway, thank you for the book recommendation. Available cheaply through A Certain e-vendor, 'tis added to the wish list. Three from me that all deal with the lead up to WWI. Dreadnought, by Robert Massie, which isn't simply about the Naval arms race; far from it. The Proud Tower, by Barbara Tuchman. She is a bit journalistic & her scholarship has been called into question. And Royal Sunset by Gordon Brook-Shepherd is definitely journalistic - he was one for the Torygraph, if memory serves. The last is out of print (try getting it from the library) but all offer a somewhat sideways view of the run-up to the war and, therefore, offer a different perspective, in different ways.

For eyewitness (what? You thought three meant "only three"? ;-) ) Overtones of War by Edmund Blunden, one of the less well known war poets. And anything by Richard van Emden. He is less an author than an editor - he speaks sparingly & lets his eyewitness speak. I can only wonder what he might have done with your Grandad's tapes...