Bond Bites: The summer of love

A deadly threat to the norms of daily life has been contained; authorities plot a return to the old routines and citizens pick up the threads of interrupted lives; lavish parties are high on the agenda. So, I imagine, it looked to the delegates at the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15. Over the preceding 23 years the acrid smoke of continuous revolution and war had swirled across Europe from Paris to the gates of Moscow, and then all the way back again. But now Napoleon had been safely dispatched to Elba.