Personally, I blame the toasters.

When American tourists began returning gingerly to Britain after the Second World War, and then in rapidly increasing numbers from the mid-1950s, they found a country made newly old. Of course Americans had always—or at least since the early nineteenth century—visited Britain in search of The Old Country, that is, the country of their roots, the country of neatly cultivated green fields, tightly clustered villages, parish churches, and manor houses from which their Puritan ancestors had fled. But they expected to find this Old Country surviving in the midst of a modern one, the First Industrial Nation, the world's most highly urbanized society, the center of a great empire. That modern nation had, indeed, tourist sights of its own: the great brick-built cities of the north, one of which was the first port of call for the typical American visitor who disembarked at Liverpool, and the prodigy city of the Western world, London, to which all visitors quickly made their way upon arrival.

These expectations were altered by the Second World War and its aftermath. Postwar American visitors—who made up a progressively larger proportion of Britain's increasingly heritage-driven tourist trade—were less likely to be Anglo-Saxons seeking their roots and more likely to be self-conscious citizens of a new world looking for something different from themselves in the old: history, culture, a whiff of the exotic (preferably in a language not too alien). Now they disembarked at Southampton, not Liverpool, the quicker to get to Bath and Oxford. And since the 1930s, America had come up in the world and Britain decidedly down. New York was now the center of the world empire, not London. Those brick-built cities had absorbed bomb damage from which the American skyscrapers had been exempt. Britain's people were straitened by import substitution, currency controls, rationing, and class conflict. Since the 1930s, Americans had come to define themselves increasingly by their high standard of living, and especially by their high levels of personal consumption, and to define others against those standards. The British did not compare well.

So postwar American tourists went looking for one Old Country—the Old Country of cathedrals and Shakespeare and Walter Scott—and found another—a new Old Country of inadequate plumbing and heating, tiny packets of food, shabby clothing, and “quaintness.” “These ruins are inhabited!” apostrophized one American journalist, Muriel Beadle, in her bestselling memoir of a year living in Oxford, published in 1961.Footnote 1 To Beadle, as to many others, the toaster was pregnantly symbolic. The postwar American toaster was a modern electric gadget with no visible working parts and a timer that popped up the bread when browned to the desired degree. At best, the postwar British toaster was a leftover from the 1930s, a mysterious contraption with a central heating element and two racks holding bread that clipped to either side, requiring frequent checks and manual turning. At worst, the toaster was just a rack inserted under the grill of a gas cooker, where the bread hid until burned.

No wonder Americans came to conclude, in the 1950s and 1960s as they had not consistently beforehand, that the antiquity of Britain, or at least England—its long history as a nation—was inconsistent with modernity. Here was the genesis of the “cultural” explanation of British decline, the link between persistent cultural features and poor British economic performance in the later twentieth century. This is not to say that “declinism” lacked British exponents; one thinks of would-be modernizers such as C. P. Snow and Anthony Sampson, who offered a historical critique to explain—and combat—what they saw as unhealthy British technophobia and paralyzing class conventions. But it is probably the case that Americans were more likely than others, because of the specific divergences between the American and British experiences from the 1930s to the 1950s, to view postwar Britain through sepia-tinted spectacles. As early as 1960, William Watson complained that “unreflective [foreigners] are inclined to write off the country as a kind of animated museum,” mistaking “the stability of British life” for “rigidity or an inability to adapt new ideas.”Footnote 2 In the late 1960s, thanks partly to the efforts of people like Snow and Sampson, the invention of “Swinging London” helped briefly to disrupt these associations, but the moment of youthful, bopping, sixties Britain was too brief and was quickly succeeded by the economic gloom and social grief of the 1970s, which restored old assumptions. The miners' strikes of 1972 and 1974 even restored some of the old paraphernalia, as power cuts brought back the paraffin lamps and heaters and coal-fired stoves that had so astonished American visitors of the early 1960s. By the late 1970s, protracted stagnation had even the British temporarily believing American stories about their backwardness. Margaret Thatcher's modernization rhetoric owed something, at least, to that classic American text of “declinism,” Martin Wiener's English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Cambridge, 1981). By then, as Wiener's example suggests, writing British history as a history of antimodernism had become something of an American specialty.

Since the early 1990s, and especially since the late 1990s, however, declinism has been in retreat. Economic recovery cast doubt on British backwardness both in the short term and in the long; Britain's “decline” over the twentieth century now appeared to be merely relative. Imperial illusions were receding; so were class barriers. Thatcher's self-punishing modernization rhetoric was succeeded by Blair's more frankly celebratory version: Britain not only should be “modern,” it was, and always had been. In a bellwether lecture in November 1997, Gordon Brown repudiated both Thatcher's call for a return to “Victorian values” and John Major's comfortable nostalgia, arguing that “the traditional British way” is “the modern British way”: “Being creative, adaptable and outward-looking, our believing in liberty, duty and fair play add up to the British genius that has been manifest throughout our history.”Footnote 3

Accordingly, historians now find themselves rediscovering British modernity. As I write, the Victoria and Albert Museum is opening an exhibition to mark the 150th anniversary of the Crystal Palace (and the one hundredth of Queen Victoria's death) under the slogan, “Inventing New Britain,” brashly pitching the Victorians as forerunners of Blairism; ads in the Tube remind us which features of modernity we owe to the Victorians, including, if not the pop-up toaster, the electric iron. Two recent volumes of essays—first Moments of Modernity, and then, following rather cheekily, Meanings of Modernity Footnote 4—offer collective defenses of that previously illegitimate copulation, British Modern, the one covering 1945–64 and the other 1870–1940, so that between them they present a more or less continuous history of “the modern” in Britain over just the period marked in Wiener's view by “the decline of the industrial spirit.” These collectionsFootnote 5—and the books under review here, all of which tackle more or less directly the modernity of British culture—come from a thoroughly mixed Anglo-American cast of characters, testifying perhaps to a reconvergence of British and American experience that is showing up in historiography as surely as it is in other aspects of contemporary culture.

Peter Stansky's essays and reviews cover nearly the whole of the latter half of the twentieth century, and their collection in From William Morris to Sergeant Pepper offers an opportunity to monitor the ebb and flow of antimodernism in British historiography through the prism of one historian's sensibility. Actually, Stansky was never sold totally on the antimodern line. He first visited Britain in the summer of 1950, after his freshman year in college, and although subject to rationing and the austerities of a bedsit on the Edgware Road, he did not draw sweeping conclusions about British backwardness, perhaps because he took in France and Italy on the same trip and got a full picture of the sad state of postwar Europe as a whole. (He did notice the antique toasters.) More influential were the two years he spent at King's College, Cambridge, in 1953–55, where he began to develop his lifelong fascination with the British moderns of the Bloomsbury group. (Subliminally, however, he may have been influenced there by the faux-nostalgic affectation of Oxbridge undergraduates for toasting their bread and muffins on forks—or, at a pinch, the points of wire hangers—before gas or electric fires. The practice persists to this day, undaunted by admonitions from Margaret Thatcher or Gordon Brown, or from domestic bursars.) Stansky admits to being charmed by the Bloomsbury formula of gentility and experimentation, and this particular entrée into British society undoubtedly accounts in part for the haut bohemian tone of much of his writing on Britain—writing in which the adjectives “splendid,” “pleasant,” and “attractive” proliferate; into which the phrase “sound Kentish yeoman stock” can drop with only a whisper of irony; and in which “the air of authority…which marks a public school ‘old boy’” is both guyed and emulated (pp. 82, 233).Footnote 6

Though today we are inclined to think of Bloomsbury as an integral part of the English heritage industry—and, owing to the propaganda of the likes of John Carey, to regard even its gentle modernism as a symbol of antidemocratic snobbery and nostalgia—this estimate puts too much weight on the gentility and not enough on the experimentation of Bloomsbury. It is also a perspective from the late twentieth century, rather than its midpoint, which was from where Stansky, unusually early, first discovered Bloomsbury. Startlingly, he came to it through a youthful fascination with the Spanish Civil War, and devoted his Yale senior essay to a study of four young English writers—including Bloomsbury's own Julian Bell—who were drawn to Spain by that cause, sublimating, as he later wrote, his own political engagement at a time, the early 1950s, when such causes were either dead or too dangerous.

It was not only in politics that Stansky's approach to Bloomsbury can be seen to have been radical in its day. For a British historian training in the 1950s, literary biography itself was a suspicious pursuit—too subjective, too far from the approved mainstream of political history. Pursuing his doctoral research at Harvard, Stansky was gently shunted by his supervisors back onto the main line, which explains why his first book was the comparatively straitlaced Ambitions and Strategies (Oxford, 1964), about the battle for the Liberal Party leadership after Gladstone. But thereafter, and especially after he settled permanently in the freer atmosphere of California with his partner, the editor William Abrahams, his gut instincts blossomed. Two of his four young civil warriors, Julian Bell and John Cornford, are featured in Journey to the Frontier: Two Roads to the Spanish Civil War (New York, 1966), still in my view the most riveting, inspirational, yet unsentimental account of British engagement with the Spanish tragedy. A third, George Orwell, was the subject of extended study in two volumes of revelatory biography, The Unknown Orwell (London, 1972) and Orwell: The Transformation (London, 1979). (These three books were all coauthored with Abrahams, who died in 1998 and to whom the selected essays are dedicated.)

Compared to the new social and labor history, of course, Stansky's fascination with Bloomsbury and Orwell might be seen as slightly detached and effete; as Stansky grants, to have put himself on the cutting edge he ought to have written about the working-class brigaders in Spain. But that would not have satisfied his own psychological and aesthetic instincts, and in any case, he might have argued, labor history was not the only way to capture a panoptic vision of English society. Orwell, more than Bell and Cornford, offered obvious attractions from this point of view; so, just as strongly, did the subject of so much of Stansky's writings in the 1980s and 1990s, William Morris, and the artists and intellectuals observing Britain in the Second World War who formed the focus of the last Stansky-Abrahams co-production, London's Burning (London, 1994).

How modern does Britain appear as observed through Bloomsbury, Orwell, and Morris? As we have seen, Stansky admits to a personal attraction to the peculiar blend of coziness and caustic exemplified by these rebels of the upper, middle (and “lower-upper-middle”) class. It is a combination that he calls the “radical domestic,” symbolized for him by the splenetic demonstrator who once poured abuse on him as he left the Camden Roundhouse theater, then politely apologized when he pointed out that she had given him a blank sheet instead of a leaflet (pp. vii–viii). But he is usually aware that this is a statement about a certain class of maverick rather than about society as a whole. He places particular emphasis on the public school as a nursery both of conformism and rebellion, in Gladstone and Churchill quite as much as Orwell (p. 150). His fondness for the Bloomsberries does not blind him to their own class prejudices, and his approval for their sexual experimentalism and honesty in personal relations does not cause him (as it does others) to mistake them for pioneers either: “they were neither gurus of permissiveness nor firm believers in the right of the hoi polloi to know” (pp. 249, 253).

Nevertheless, Stansky does partake in some measure of the late twentieth-century American tendency to see Britain as peculiarly backward. Although he admits at one point that he does not know enough about other countries' experience to say so for certain, nevertheless he persists in believing that the habit of criticizing modern society on aesthetic grounds, especially from the vantage point of an ideal countryside, is “peculiarly English” (pp. 21, 127, 220).Footnote 7 Thus English radicalism is unusually “backward looking.” Morris and Orwell were obsessed with the countryside, and Orwell, at least, with history. It is even “a characteristic English touch” that the first woman to take her seat as an M.P. (and, I suppose, the first woman prime minister) should be a Tory (pp. 221, 225, 198). All such references are suffused with affection, but not without a trace of condescension either, and there is at points more than a trace of “declinism” implicit. Stansky never embraced “declinism” in its rawest form. In a review of Wiener in Victorian Studies—not reprinted here—he was notably cool, suggesting that Wiener had underestimated the Establishment's ability to combine superficial imperturbability with steady, clinical adaptation to change.Footnote 8 But if Stansky did not buy Wiener's declinism, some of it had long since rubbed off on him from the zeitgeist. And here, in one respect, he shares some attitudes with the historiographical generations who came after him, both neo-Marxist labor historians and Foucauldians. The continuity of English history—the appearance of “comparative stability and lack of conflict”—is a bit boring (p. 25). Might it not also, therefore, be a defect? Whereas continuity had been held up before the Second World War as a signal virtue in a Europe racked by civil and international strife, fascism, and communism, in the comfortable postwar years it became possible to yearn a little for the excitements of war and revolution. It seems possible that Stansky's vicarious enthusiasm for the Spanish Civil War, which led him to Britain in the first place, might have caused him thereafter to be slightly disappointed by its rather un-Spanish, unwarlike, very civil character.

It is a feature of much of the recent revisionist writing on British modernity that it reconsiders the ambiguities of continuity, no longer always to Britain's discredit.Footnote 9 When George Behlmer writes in his introduction to Peter Stansky's Festschrift that “‘continuity’ is a protean notion whose perceived usefulness as an analytical category for historians ebbs and floods with scholarly fashion,” he is clear that he and his contributors are riding on the flood tide. Employing one of Stansky's favorite quotations from Orwell—the image of England as “an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same”—he evokes “the curiously elastic nature of British cultural continuity” without a hint of condescension or dispraise (Singular Continuities, pp. 9–10; see also Stansky, p. 255). Even nostalgia, in the Wiener world so often portrayed as the damnosa hereditas of English culture, can be “a strategy for coping with change, loss, or anomie,” performing “an integrative service by reassuring individuals (and nations) that continuity—what one sociologist calls a ‘restitutive link’—exists between former and current conditions”: in other words, a crucial support for rather than (or as well as) a barrier to change (Singular Continuities, p. 7).

In the nature of Festschriften, even more than other essay collections, not all the contributors march to the beat of their editors' drum—they do not all even hear it, as is evident in essays on Jewish immigration, suffragist reading, sport in the First World War, and Patty Seleski's compellingly persuasive discussion of Irish applicants for poor relief in early nineteenth-century London. Among those that do bear directly on the theme of continuity and nostalgia, Stewart Weaver's on the nostalgic tendencies of the Pro-Boers hews closest to Stansky's own standpoint. Asserting that the socialists among the Pro-Boers were “of a peculiarly English, backward-looking sort,” and that “at bottom” the Pro-Boer position “signified an imprecise, even unconscious, aversion to the modern age,” nevertheless he stops short of identifying this position with English culture as a whole—not least because the Pro-Boer position was held by a “tiny eccentric minority.” All the same, he wants to draw some kind of connection, however faint, between Liberal romanticism about the plucky, pastoral Boers and later Liberal welfare reforms—“disenchantment with modern commerce” lay behind both; “cultural preservation” was the common goal (Singular Continuities, pp. 51, 54, 56). Can the welfare state really be written off as antimodern in that way? If so, is there anything “peculiarly English” about it? Michael Saler's ingenious essay on Humphrey Jennings, one of the principal protagonists of Stansky and Abrahams's London's Burning, edges away from this position by insisting on parallels between Jennings's history of the modern British “collective unconscious,” the unfinished Pandaemonium, and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project—a comparison that would have been unthinkable a scant few years ago, when Benjamin's dicing with modernity was taken as quintessentially Continental, ergo un-English. Yet Saler, too, concludes that Jennings's project “could not entirely liberate itself from the Whiggish presuppositions of its own time and place…his own culture's pride in its tradition proved overwhelming: remembering the past condemned him to repeat it.” While Saler's characterizations of Jennings's cultural ambience are unexceptionable, his choice of words (“liberate,” “condemned”) still points to an older evaluation of the limits of English culture—doubly unfortunate here, as it was surely Benjamin who was “condemned.” No wonder Benjamin was alienated from “pride” and “tradition”; no wonder he was less eager to remember the past than Jennings; these things threatened to annihilate him, and would have done had he not cheated them by killing himself in 1940, on the brink of the concentration camp (Singular Continuities, p. 142). Is alienation a necessary characteristic of modernity? If so, is it worth it? Sometimes that “restitutive link” can be a life preserver.

Other essays are essentially agnostic or even positive about continuity. Reba Soffer's study of three understudied Conservative thinkers is quietly admiring of the persistence and flexibility of twentieth-century Toryism. Fred Leventhal provides a fascinating glimpse into the continuous reinvention of the British monarchy through the unlikely medium of the 1939 royal visit to America, which presented an image stripped of “the visible trappings of majesty.” The royal visit, Leventhal suggests, materially helped to solidify the Anglo-American alliance on the basis not of an outmoded nostalgia or racial kinship but rather of an “essential democracy.” Two final essays by Chris Waters and Howard Malchow helpfully suggest why two quite different aspects of late twentiethcentury “heritage” consciousness testify more to a particular historical conjuncture than to enduring retrospection. Nostalgia for “working-class culture,” Waters argues, was the product of a particular moment in the 1960s and 1970s marked by the coincidence of urban renewal, social mobility, community dislocation, and, strangely, “community empowerment” (in the form of literacy and local-history projects). That moment has already passed. Malchow's inquiry into the London antiques trade shows how it absorbed and was transformed by successive waves of quite different “heritage” feeling—profound nostalgia in the “dystopian 1970s,” driving acquisitiveness in the Thatcherite 1980s. If this is a backward-looking culture, it is surely one that is always finding hip new ways in which to look backward.

So the continuity of English history is not necessarily a disqualification for economic dynamism; how does it stand with regard to other alleged measures of modernity? Beyond economic performance perhaps the most obvious—perhaps too obvious—test is the prevalence of modernism. Surely British insularity and cultural conservatism, by cutting the island off from healthy continental experimentalism, hobbled the development of a native avant-garde and aborted the flowering of those aesthetic modernisms that are one certain gauge of high-performance modernity. One can even imagine, again, that American tourists of the 1950s and early 1960s must have noticed, along with the absence of toasters, the distinct thinness on the ground of British abstract expressionists and twelve-tone composers—how different from the home life of their own dear country.

If tourists did not notice this disparity, historians certainly have. Nestling alongside economic declinism, cultural declinism has become one of the hoariest of clichés about twentieth-century Britain.Footnote 10 Particular horror has been expressed at the philistinism and materialism of the Edwardian period, just the period when avant-gardes were meant to be doing their worst (or best)—no belle epoque for the British! But the consequences are seen to have spilled inexorably across subsequent generations, practically up to the present day. Cultural declinism has received less searching attention than economic declinism, even though its premises seem even on superficial scrutiny rather more than less suspect. It might be thought, for example, that philistinism and materialism should be good for the economic side of modernity even if bad for the cultural side. Apart from the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, the most dynamic economies of the twentieth century rarely nurtured dynamic avant-gardes. Stalin's Soviet Union? Postwar Japan? And then, too, why should the qualities of the turn-of-the-century avant-garde—formal experimentalism, bohemian lifestyles, an acute (but not necessarily positive) sensitivity to change—be considered the timeless measure of modernity in the aesthetic sphere?

Thankfully, cultural declinism too is coming under attack. Between them Michael Saler and Lisa Tickner defend boldly two of the widely identified weak spots in British art and design in order to vindicate that hitherto inconceivable phenomenon, “British modernism.” In The Avant-Garde in Interwar England, Saler addresses the alleged decline of British design after its promising beginnings in the age of Ruskin and Morris. Arguing against the conventional view that the British school of modern design dissipated after 1900, aborted either by a pervasive conservatism among tastemakers or by an elitist formalism foisted upon it by the Bloomsbury group, Saler traces forward from 1918 a vibrant Ruskinian modern tradition thriving in hitherto neglected parts of the British art and design scene. He focuses in particular on the knot of Yorkshire-born artists clustered around Herbert Read, who enunciated a modernist creed that was explicitly crafted as a more masculine, more northern, Protestant and English, and more socially conscious alternative to the soft, southern, super-aesthetic Francophilia of Roger Fry and Clive Bell. This tradition had its apotheosis in the career of Frank Pick, whose Yorkshire nonconformist roots and Morrissian ethical socialism found an unlikely outlet in the railway industry—likely for a young man growing up in York, but unlikely for a Ruskinian—and ultimately in Pick's masterpiece, the work of art that is the London Underground.Footnote 11

Having argued vigorously for the survival and continued evolution of a Ruskinian modernism through the 1930s, Saler suggests—in a tone similar to that adopted in his essay in Singular Continuities—that British design nevertheless lost the plot after 1945, paradoxically because it sought to emulate American successes. The Ruskinian tradition had argued for a melding of art and design. After 1945, official bodies charged with reorganizing British design education insisted that this aesthetic viewpoint was holding back design, giving it an unhealthy “crafts” orientation where a more specialized and technical approach was needed to service the burgeoning consumer-goods sector. As a result, Saler argues with implicit regret, “fine art” elitism snuck back onto the scene and asserted itself through bodies such as the Arts Council. But that tells only half the story—the half that was so often told in the declinist 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps the Art Council's rather fuddy-duddy understanding of fine art did blight for a time the British art scene, at least in its more visible, establishment manifestations. Beneath that level, however, what were the longer-term consequences of the specialized, technical “basic design” that was propagated in the art colleges in order to train a rising generation of designers for the consumer economy? Already in the 1960s beneficial effects were evident in the genre-bending, multimedia work coming out of the London art colleges, especially in hitherto backwater fields such as photography and graphic design. Much of this was ignored, or abhorred, by the “fine art” establishment. Today, of course, this same kind of work is the fine art establishment, as multimedia installations have displaced painting and sculpture from the center of the global art market. Consequently products of the British art colleges now dominate not only the fine art world but also key sectors of consumer-product design such as fashion and computer graphics. “British modern” design thus looks different, and more successful, from 2001 than it did from 1981—a changing perspective only partially registered in Saler's book, which is, after all, not about postwar but interwar design.

If the declinist argument about modern design in Britain holds that it was killed off by Bloomsbury Francophilia, the declinist argument about modern art in Britain holds, irritatingly, that it was insufficiently Francophile. The kind of abstraction advocated by Fry and Bell was apparently potent enough to crowd out the Bauhaus but not potent enough to inaugurate abstract expressionism. Saler's riposte to declinism in design—that Britain had its own kind of Bauhaus aboveground in Yorkshire and underground in London—is neatly matched by Lisa Tickner's riposte to declinism in painting—that Britain had its own modern art scene, quite sufficiently “modern” if not measured against inappropriately French “modernist” benchmarks. British artists working in the world metropolis of London had, after all, quite as rich a fund of modernity—that is, of “modern subjects”—to draw upon as did those working in Paris. What was not modern about Sickert's anomic urban nudes and prostitutes, Wyndham Lewis's cabaret dancers, Bomberg's cubist immigrants, even Augustus John's tramping gypsies?

The answer is, of course, not about content but about form. The historiography of modernism has privileged formal experimentation—and certain kinds of formal experimentation—in ways that make British modernism look pallid. In Modern Life and Modern Subjects, Tickner adopts two main strategies for thwarting this simplistic closure. First, she chooses a fairly early moment at which “opinion had not yet sedimented to the extent that John, Sickert, Bloomsbury and Lewis had been ranked in ascending order, and on formal grounds, in the hierarchy of British modernism” (p. 12) (and, implicitly, British modernism ranked low in the hierarchy of international modernism). Second, she dwells not upon forms but upon “subjects,” in both meanings of the word, the subjects of the pictures—which, as a catalog of prostitutes, cabaret dancers, immigrants, and gypsies suggests, beat thrillingly with the pulse of the modern metropolis—and the identities or subjectivities evoked by these pictures. Here there is a connection with Saler's argument, for both argue that on Peter Bürger's definition of the avant-garde—an agitational group seeking to reconnect art and life—British artists of the early twentieth century were singularly successful at finding ways of expressing modern life through art without necessarily employing the formal vocabulary of international modernism (Saler, pp. 7–8; Tickner, pp. 187–89). Which is not to say that they lacked a formal vocabulary of their own. One of the singular delights of Tickner's book is its insistence on returning over and over again to the formal qualities of the works, both in their refiguring of traditional figure painting and also in their visuality, which cannot (in the nature of visual images) be reduced to context or to description.

Tickner ends her book defiantly with a Vanessa Bell abstraction, possibly a “failure” if judged by the received standards of abstraction (and indeed by Clive Bell's own standards in his manifesto, Art [London, 1914]), but a perfectly acceptable expression of modernity if modernism is opened up and the traces of “the emotions of ‘life’” that seep into Vanessa Bell's art are permitted to register. The complex way in which she shows those “emotions of ‘life’” entering into the composition makes for slow, engrossing reading, but we should not wish it otherwise. Tickner's is simply the best book yet written by an art historian about British modernism, not only because it embraces joyfully that improper copulation but also because it sternly denies the historian the pleasures of simple reduction to context or content. That latter quality makes it harder to integrate her work into a wider cultural history of “modern” Britain, but it preserves the sticky integrity of art. Nevertheless, by tackling head on the best-defended strongholds of cultural declinism, Tickner's and Saler's books should make it easier for someone to write the revisionist history that recent historiography suggests ought to be just around the corner.