Encased within the drama of John Galsworthy's "The Forsyte Saga," Peter Hovenden Longley weaves an autobiographical reminiscence of his own English family from the 1880s to the 1960s. Brought up in the last days of Forsythia, a world of the 3 percent born in privilege to serve the British Empire, Longley celebrates his family's lost generations. Nothing-neither the abdication of the King Emperor Edward VIII in 1936 nor Adolf Hitler's relentless bombs-could shake the British people's conviction that theirs was the eternal kingdom. Blindly, they believed that after a good cup of strong,...