Bertrand Russell was born in 1872. He remembered his grandfather (who had met Napoleon, introduced the Reform Bill of 1832, and served as Prime Minister) "quite well." In a remarkable interview, he reflected on the world of his youth: "The world where I was young was a solid world. A world where all kinds of things that have now disappeared were thought to be going to last forever." The British took naval supremacy not as a political reality but as a fact of nature. Germany wasn't feared — Bismarck was dismissed as "a rascal" and "a sort of uneducated farmer." The assumption was that Goethe and Schiller would eventually bring Germany back to civilisation. Bismarck himself compared Germany and England to an elephant and a whale — each formidable in its own element, no danger to each other. That was exactly how they felt. There was also a shared political assumption: that the entire world was gradually, inevitably moving toward parliamentary democracy. His grandmother once said cheerfully to the Russian ambassador: "Perhaps someday you will have a parliament in Russia." He replied: "God forbid." Russell notes, dryly, that a Russian ambassador today might give the same answer — "except for the first word." At home, life was shaped by Puritanical austerity. Family prayers at 8am. Half an hour of piano practice beforehand — which Russell hated. Eight servants, yet food of "the utmost simplicity." If apple tart appeared alongside rice pudding, the adults had the apple tart. Russell had the rice pudding. What Russell describes isn't just personal memoir. It's a civilisation that had mistaken its own moment for a permanent condition — that looked at the arrangements of the late 19th century and concluded: this is how things are, and how they will remain. They were wrong about almost everything.