How the World Made the West Josephine Quinn, Penguin Random House, 2024, hb., 572pps., $20 I first saw this book in the window of Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford. I was struck – although not surprised – by how logically out of place it was, surrounded by the handsome architecture of old intellectual England. Written by… Continue reading
Posts Tagged → British Empire
Empire state of mind
Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning Nigel Biggar, London: William Collins, 2023, 480pps., $34.99 Ideologues are frequently performative, but sometimes they are simply pantomimic. One of today’s major stock villains is the British Empire – seen in melodramatic minds as a swaggering dastard, slashing through global history like Captain Hook in murderous search of Peter Pan and… Continue reading
The imperial imperative
In the Shadow of the Gods: The Emperor in World History Dominic Lieven, London: Allen Lane, 2022, 500 pps. hb., illus., £35 In the battle for precedence between the ‘great man’ and more ‘inclusive’ views of history, an account of emperors across centuries and cultures feels like a defiant assertion of the older school. Cambridge… Continue reading
Sustained magnificence – Max Hastings’ Winston’s War
Sustained Magnificence Winston’s War: Churchill 1940-1945 Max Hastings, New York: Alfred A. Knopf 576 pp., $35.00 Sixty-five years after the last guns ceased firing on the last Pacific atoll, Britons of all political persuasions are still wallowing in tepid World War II nostalgia. For Atlanticists, neoconservatives, and classical liberals, the war was a great Anglo- sphere… Continue reading