Lawrence James
When The World Was Red
The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System 1830–1970
By John Darwin
Cambridge University Press 800pp £25 order from our bookshop
Understanding the British Empire
By Ronald Hyam
Cambridge University Press 552pp £65 hbk £24.99 pbk order from our bookshop
The British Empire will not go away. A flood of television documentaries continues to chart its overall history, or focus on its myriad human stories, preferably scandalous or violent or both. Imperial history has become a literary growth industry and there is a vogue for fiction about the Empire, often written by men and women who grew up in the hybrid cultures it fostered. From time to time, there are also spasms of national breast-beating. Rows over whether or not the Empire was a good thing still erupt in the press and help keep alive our consciousness of its part in the history of our country and the rest of the world.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The unisexual roster saves us from diatribes about the iniquity of the male gaze, and in any case the female gaze is capable of retaliating by aestheticising and eroticising the bodies of men.'
Peter Conrad on @markcousinsfilm's new documentary.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/lets-get-this-show-on-the-road
Dethier 'writes about mud buildings without the telltale modulations other critics use to distance so-called vernacular construction from the canon of high architecture.'
Building with earth may be the future, says @PhinHarper.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/build-brown-go-green
'Their legacy is tenacious. Throughout Europe, it lingers in the placement of borders, in patterns of confessional belief, in styles of architecture, even in ideas of national and supranational sovereignty.'
John Adamson on the hardy Habsburgs.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/born-to-marry