Biography of five major Edwardians, told in the general vein of Lytton Strachey's "Eminent Victorians." Brendon is much more focused on his own wittiness than on practical information, which makes the book go quickly but occasionally sours; yes, I appreciate that he's approaching his subjects without much in the way of respect or reverence, but sometimes he seems entirely too irreverent. Or just plain ignorant. (At one point he suggests that some suffragettes were motivated by lesbianism. They wanted the vote because lesbians, I guess? I just...) He deals with his subjects in an approximate vacuum, so for example he's totally uninterested in how the women's suffrage movement started or why many people believed in it; his focus is entirely on Pankhurst's involvement. He's doing character portraits, not biography. 

It was a reasonably fast read and certainly amusing at times but it often left me with a bad taste in my mouth, particularly when he was waxing glib about Baden-Powell's involvement in the Boer War and wild racism.