ABSTRACT
The Europe into which Holford travelled in 1930 was, it seemed, a continent in which the constituent elements of society were rapidly polarizing. The German elections of that year had resulted in the emergence of both Nazi and Communist parties as major political forces, and in France too the struggles between right and left were gaining in intensity. Mussolini had consolidated his power in Italy, while the Soviet Union was two years into the first of its Five Year Plans. The old order had been put to the test in 1929 and found wanting; and to Holford and Stephenson, as they corresponded over the coming three years, the muddle-headedness and decaying bourgeois gentilities of England came more and more to resemble doomed relics of an earlier age.1
