and predominance". The British national character, Barnett argues, underwent a profound moral revolution in the nineteenth century which came to have a deep effect on British foreign policy; foreign policy was now to be conducted in a reverence of highly ethical standards rather than an "expedient and opportunist pursuit of England's interests". Barnett came to this conclusion by beginning "with a colour-coded flow-chart which logically traced back step by step to their origins the chains of causation of all the 'total-strategic' factors in Britain's plight in 1940–1941: political, military, economic, technological. These various chains eventually converged on a common primary cause: a mutation in the values – indeed the very character – of the British governing classes which began in the early nineteenth century. This mutation supplied the starting-point of my narrative, and thereafter, in Enoch Powell's words in his review, was my 'guiding and interpretative thread through the events of the twenty inter-war years'." A.J.P. Taylor said of The Collapse of British Power: "This is fine fighting stuff, powerfully based on the historical records". Robert Blake said the book was "Pungently written, perceptive and controversial". Rab Butler said that "The book should be praised for its profound research...It is written in excellent prose and with great historical ability which will be valuable to historians and challenging to any of us. However, to read alone it gives a false conception of Britain as we know her today, and is the sort of work which must be read in the company of others if one is to get a clear conception of the change of British status...I have some sympathy with the author's criticism of the defects of the English education system in those vital days, not only in the arts but also in the technical field...What is important, however, to realize in reading Mr Barnett's book is that the greatness of the Victorian age was made up of very much those qualities which he describes as leading to Britain's decline". Peter Hennessy claims The Audit of War "acquired an instant vogue when published in 1986". Paul Addison called The Audit of War as "the most thorough and sustained assault so far" on wartime orthodoxy. Addison recognised that Barnett "is a withering critic of nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalism and its legacy for twentieth-century Britain. To this extent he shares some common ground with Marxist historians and quotes E.P. Thompson with approval. But