david H

The book I would unhesitatingly recommend is "The Collapse of British Power" by Correlli Barnett. One cannot understand our decline into sentimentality and weakness without study of this masterpiece. He finds the origins in Methodism of the early 18c and follows it through to appeasement.
Some important pointsa are how Thomas rnold turned the public school system into a place where rulers were imersed in unreality instead of a practical understanding of how the world really goes on.
The war writers and their effiminate pining about the conditions in the trenches when two thirds of the Working Classes lived their everyday lives in such conditions and how "The Lost Generation" applied only to a small ruling class and that Germany lost many more. The weakness is that he does not consider the invidious effect of the French Revolution. This infected people who needed accurate judgement of others and a practical wisdom with abstract ideas. In fact the anti-British attitude of the whole political, cultura, intellectrual and corporate elites had its origins in the pro and anti-Britisah attitudes of Charles James Fox and his circle and radicals like Whitbread.