• Rupert Murdoch, outrageous media baron whose empire, built in an 'ethical void', controls contemporary channels of knowledge;
 • Prince Charles, quack dilettante whose messy private life shook the throne;
 • Margaret Thatcher, the daughter of a grocer whose authoritarian regime undid much of Britain's post-war legacy; and
 • Mick Jagger, the big-lipped egotist whose excesses epitomized the swinging sixties.

Each had their part to play in the continuity and change that marked the twentieth century, from the cultural revolution of the 1960s which transformed the modern world, to the subsequent reaction against this modern devil's decade.

Modelled on Lytton Strachey's classic work about the Victorians, these irreverent and insightful miniatures, set in vivid historical context, shed new light on the Elizabethan age as a whole.