Mitchell is counted among a talented generation of post-war historians, including Maurice Keen, Alexander Murray and Henry Mayr-Harting.
This allows him to sidestep the deadening effects of a linear narrative and to bury in the background the kind of relentless detail that can make reading biography such a slog.
"[6]"In 10 wonderful chapters, as fluid and generous as anything that Macaulay or Trevelyan ever wrote, Mitchell sets about describing a tone, a temper and a style that was emphatically Whig.
He takes us from those great "power statements in stone" of Chatsworth or Woburn Abbey to the buffing and polishing that went on during the grand tour, only reluctantly and temporarily abandoned thanks to a little unpleasantness in Paris; we visit languorous Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria's earliest crush, who believed that parliamentary reform was probably inevitable, although he couldn't be bothered to read the detailed clauses of various bills.
The result is an elegant exposition of a way of being that informed, without directing, let alone controlling, some of the most important social and political developments of the second half of the Georgian period.