Our Tempestuous Day

A lively and thoroughly enthralling account of thisparadoxical age ... [that reads] like a whopping good novel. --- New York Times Book Review. Regency England the period between 1810 and 1820 has long been seen as a decade of hedonism and romance when dashing beaux and elegant belles played out their flirtations against a backdrop of opulence and style. Yet beneath the surface glitter of the Regency lay an underlying malaise a pervasive hollowness and sense of loss along with an explosive undercurrent of popular unrest and political radicalism.. It was indeed a tempestuous quicksilver era haunted by war and the human wreckage of war and by fears of Luddite violence and risings of the overtaxed underfed poor. A time of financial uncertainty when fortunes were made and lost amid high risk and the ever-present specter of bankruptcy.. And it was memorably a decade studded with larger-than-life personalities: the aged king in his slow decline into delusion; the flamboyant Prince Regent in his extravagant Brighton Pavilion; the Duke of Wellington hero of Waterloo; the debauched tragically fissured Lord Byron hero to the women of fashionable London. These and many others are brought to vibrant life in this wide-ranging captivating social history---a history as dramatic as the times themselves.. Anyone wanting a lively decorative introduction to the Regency could not do better than Our Tempestuous Day.---Washington Post