Twenty Years On is the sequel to Peter Stansky's earlier collection of essays, From William Morris to Sergeant Pepper (1998). The subtitle of this book tells it all: Views and Reviews of Modern Britain. The book has three distinct features: (1) it is a detailed study of subjects, from William Morris to George Orwell, that have preoccupied Stansky throughout his distinguished career; (2) it has strong autobiographical elements that not only illuminate the subjects of Stansky's studies but also shed light on the character of British studies as it has been practiced in the past fifty years; and (3) while the book is a collection of essays dealing with particular figures and subjects, it also addresses general questions, and Stansky cleverly raises large issues of historical research—that is, it has elements that are both ideographic and nomothetic. Stansky has not forgotten Leopold von Ranke's central teachings: objectivity requires not only the strictest method but also intuition and imagination because the facts never speak for themselves and require historians’ interpretations.

The book is organized into seven parts: “The Arts and Crafts,” “Bloomsbury,” “George Orwell,” “Jews,” “Writers and Photographers,” “Britain at War,” and “Presenting British History.” These sections of the book scan across both Stansky's searching interests and some of the major questions of British historical studies in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods and beyond.

In part one, Stansky takes up questions of art and design and William Morris's ironic career as a convinced socialist and a successful businessman who used his inherited shares in tin mines and the financial resources from business to invest in the transformation of society. In part two, Stansky turns to Leonard Woolf, a highly successful imperial civil servant, who went off to Ceylon with seventy volumes of Voltaire. He returned to London and fell in love with Virginia Stephen. Becoming a pilar of Bloomsbury, he and his wife, at the Hogarth Press, published Virginia's experimental fiction, the works of Russian writers, and James Strachey's (the brother of Lytton Strachey) English translation of Freud's collected. In chapter 11, the final chapter of this part, Stansky focuses on the person of Julian Bell, the son of Vanessa and Clive Bell, who became the subject of Stansky's books Journey to the Frontier: Two Roads to the Spanish Civil War (1966) and Julian Bell: From Bloomsbury to the Spanish Civil War (2012). In part three, turning aside from the controversy about George Orwell as a man of virtue, Stansky considers him as an artist and writer. Finding him as a flawed figure, as most of humanity is, a philanderer, and a red-baiter, Stansky examines him as a fascinating thinker and writer, “a patriotic radical . . . in a particular English tradition” (117). In part four, conscious of his own family background, Stansky considers Disraeli's and Siegfried Sassoon's “Englishness.” Who was, to use Margaret Thatcher's phrase, “one of us?” Disraeli, baptized at an early age, thrived in the Tory party later; Sassoon considered himself “half-English” and was devoted to cricket and fox hunting.

Stansky scatters informative traces of autobiography through these essays. Born and raised in New York, he was educated at Yale, where he wrote an essay dealing with later Bloomsbury figures who went off to Spain in the Civil War. Stansky became a Kingsman at Cambridge taking a second BA degree there. His supervisor was Patrick Wilkinson, and he came know Christopher and Helen Morris (both of whom had been at Bletchley; she had been the lover of Rupert Brooke); attended the lectures of Eric Hobsbawm; became acquainted with John Vaisey (who became a prominent economist, was raised to the peerage, and became Stansky's brother-in-law). He met Frances Cornford, the poet and the mother of John Cornford, whom Stansky had written about at Yale; and came to know Dadie Rylands, John Sheppard, and A. C. Pigou. Returning to the United States, after toying with going into law and trying his hand at publishing, he went to Harvard, where he took his PhD under David Owen and became friends with John Clive; from there he went on to his career at Stanford University. In the United States, he is an influential leader, beginning with what became the North American Conference on British Studies, which he served as president and continues to be an ongoing presence. As the autobiographical threads in this collection of essays shows, Stansky knows everyone and everyone knows Stansky. They do not always agree with each other, but that is the way it should be. Historical learning depends on varieties of intellectual experience, and despite disagreements, respect and affection remain. “Only connect,” E. M. Forster said, is the important thing.

These essays sparkle with general ideas. Even as a young Kingsman studying with Noel Annan, Stansky became fascinated with the concept of an “intellectual aristocracy,” and he notes that this was a question about “the way the personal and the intellectual met” in the convergence of “ideas and gossip” (6–7). At Cambridge, he came to grips with the ironic combination of respectability and radicalism and came to understand John Cornford's famous quip that when the revolution came, half of the Cabinet would be old Etonians. Britain, Stansky discovered, was a country that could disguise something new and different by being traditional. Lurking in all of this is an important general idea that Stansky notes in an earlier book, On Or Before December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and Its Intimate World (1996): change emerges and is legitimized when it is promoted by figures who are at the fringe of things yet respectable, such as the subjects of this book. This, of course, raises the subject of what respect is and opens the way to further research.

In short, not only will students and scholars of British history profit by reading this book, but readers with general intellectual interests will likely become fascinated with both the specific topics Stansky discusses and the workings of a distinguished historian's lively approach to his subject.