the golden age

golden age

A period of or defined by outstanding excellence, quality, prosperity, or achievement. This Halloween, we're having a marathon of all the monster movies from the golden age of cinema. Many people look back on the 1950s as some kind of golden age, completely ignoring or denying many of the deep-rooted social injustices that typified that time in America.
See also: age, golden
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

the ˈgolden age (of something)

the period during which something is very successful, especially in the past: This book looks back on the golden age of steam engines, and all railway fans will enjoy it immensely.
See also: age, golden
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary
See also:
  • a golden age
  • golden age
  • the golden age of something
  • Mother Monster
  • you can't beat (something)
  • (one) can't beat (something)
  • nothing beats (something)
  • (one) can't top that
  • (one) can't beat that
  • can't beat that
References in classic literature
At last the golden age of Chinese poetry is at hand.
Mankind have never been so happy, as when the greatest part of the then known world was under the dominion of a single master; and this state of their felicity continued during the reigns of five successive princes.[*] This was the true aera of the golden age, and the only golden age which ever had any existence, unless in the warm imaginations of the poets, from the expulsion from Eden down to this day.
All this long harangue (which might very well have been spared) our knight delivered because the acorns they gave him reminded him of the golden age; and the whim seized him to address all this unnecessary argument to the goatherds, who listened to him gaping in amazement without saying a word in reply.
Then, think how narrow the gap between a negro and a white man of our own times, and how wide the interval between myself and these of the Golden Age! I was sensible of much which was unseen, and which contributed to my comfort; but save for a general impression of automatic organization, I fear I can convey very little of the difference to your mind.
"It's the easiest thing in the world," said the Story Girl, tiptoeing to the edge of the pool to peep at her own arch reflection, as some nymph left over from the golden age might do.
When the first poet or romancer told these marvellous legends (such is Eustace Bright's opinion), it was still the Golden Age. Evil had never yet existed; and sorrow, misfortune, crime, were mere shadows which the mind fancifully created for itself, as a shelter against too sunny realities; or, at most, but prophetic dreams to which the dreamer himself did not yield a waking credence.
He received them with the hospitality of the golden age, and with something of the same kind of fare; for, while he opened his arms to make them welcome, the only repast he set before them consisted of roots.
George I., an infant of eighteen, and a scraggy nest of foreign office holders, sit in the places of Themistocles, Pericles, and the illustrious scholars and generals of the Golden Age of Greece.
My first quarter at Lowood seemed an age; and not the golden age either; it comprised an irksome struggle with difficulties in habituating myself to new rules and unwonted tasks.
O, people of the Golden Age, the chief of your husbandry was to raise flowers!
The tailed men described by Lord Monboddo are now generally regarded as a product of an imagination unusually susceptible to influences generated in the golden age of our pithecan past.
or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is a gem of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet.
Then good-bye and good-bye, and charming occasion worthy of the Golden Age, and more about the flitch of bacon, and the like of that; and Twemlow goes staggering across Piccadilly with his hand to his forehead, and is nearly run down by a flushed lettercart, and at last drops safe in his easy-chair, innocent good gentleman, with his hand to his forehead still, and his head in a whirl.
Lyric Complicity: Poetry and Readers in the Golden age of Russian Literature