Before the Great War tore England apart and changed the way people lived forever, there was the glorious summer of 1911, when the country seemed full of promise and blissfully unaware of the coming storm. The Perfect Summer is Juliet Nicolson's portrait of that sunlit season, transporting us to a time nearly a century ago to experience the sights, sounds, and feelings of a society on the brink of a changing world. Drawing on rarely seen sources from royal and private archives, Nicolson reconstructs the lives of many key individuals and events in brilliant novelistic detail. Nicolson brings the brittle beauty of that portentous summer into crisp focus, giving us both an unusual insight into the varieties of existence, from Queen to suffragette, as well as the story of how, day by cloudless day, a nation began to lose its innocence. - Jacket flap.