‘Either you had no purpose’, Eliot writes in his wartime Little Gidding, ‘Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured / And is altered in fulfilment’. The work of a poet concluding a career of unparalleled significance, Eliot's Four Quartets speculate continually about what it would mean to make a good end, where an end is an objective or a conclusion, an intended destination or just a termination – and perhaps, but not necessarily, both. So if I begin this book by saying that its subject is the end of modernism, I mean ‘end’ in Eliot's double sense: the end of modernism signifies both its realisation and its dissolution. Vindicated, certainly, but melancholy in its vindication, the mood of late modernism in England resembles the watershed event that it recorded: the Second World War, too, was both a win and a winding up. In the chapters that follow, I suggest that the correlation between late modernism in England and the world-changing circumstances with which it overlapped amounts to more than a historical coincidence.