Eighteen Nineties : A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century

This remains the classic and sparkling survey of the great awakening of culture in the 1890s. Indeed, it is a book almost as well-known as many of the works of art, literature and people it describes and evaluates. It is quite unambiguously the standard work on the raffish, scandalous, tempestuous 'yellow nineties' of Wilde, Beardsley, Beerbohm and the rest.