VICTORIA'S HEIRGeorge Danger-fieldHarcourt, Brace ($3).
Victoria's Heir, a life of Edward VII, is almost worthy to be a sequel to Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria, for the stuffy, portentous Victorian age seems peculiarly able to inspire some of the best writing of the 20th Century. The late Lytton Strachey's roguish mandarinism seemed gently but fatally borne along on the undertow of a dying civilization. George Dangerfield writes with the desperate blandness of a man who has heard even in the U.S. (where he has resided since 1931) the thud of London's falling walls and the...