Noticed today in The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Saintsbury:
Important writing, strange to say, seldom gives the exact flavor of its period; if it is successful, it presents you with the soul of man, undated. Very minor literature, on the other hand, is the Baedeker of the soul, and will guide you through the curious relics, the tumble-down buildings, the flimsy palaces, the false pagodas, the distorted and fantastical and faery vistas which have cluttered the imagination of mankind at this or that brief period of its history.
Saintsbury nominates Georgian Poetry and Sinister Street as his Baedekers for the period 1910 - 1914. I could think of a few works to nominate as guidebooks for the last 50 or so years.
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