The Golden Age

With a Trollopean brilliance, Gore masterfully balances the personal with the political, the invented with the historical fact. His heroine from Hollywood, Caroline Sanford, reappears in Washington as Churchill attempts to draw Roosevelt into the war, which in turn leads to the horrors of Pearl Harbor. In the novel's ten-year span, America becomes master of the globe, and against this backdrop there is a glittering explosion in the arts. But by 1950 and the coming of the Korean War, that Golden Age is over.