The settings are exotic, the cast of thousands full of the most eccentric, egotistical, paranoid, swashbuckling players you are likely to meet in any history…. A glittering panoply of decadence, folly, farce and devastation.Ī narrative masterpiece. sumptuous chronicle of the British empire…. book is stuffed with…myriad spectacular examples of human vanity, folly, depravity and greed-and is all the better for it. An enthralling mini-series of colonial adventure…. Having largely, if often inadvertently, selfishly or ham-fistedly, engineered the world we live in, we need the courage now to face up to our record as coolly and intelligently as Lawrence James has done.įor Brendon the praise has been equally enthusiastic, but with a different lilt:īrilliant…. James’ epic is not only a first-rate narrative, but also a penetrating portrait of the British…. An intelligible introduction to a grand subject” (The Spectator Books of the Year) and James wrote a “superb history of a mammoth subject” ( The Times) it was “outstanding…. 1 One way to obtain a quick calibration of where Brendon’s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997 fits among acclaimed British assessors of empire is to compare the reviews in English periodicals quoted on the back of his book with those on the back of Lawrence James’s The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, published in 1994 and reprinted five times in paperback.
Piers Brendon has written a splendid popular history of the British Empire, illustrating yet again the continuing nostalgia for and ambivalence about the glory days of the United Kingdom, when it ruled a quarter of the globe: fifty-eight countries, four hundred million people, fourteen million square miles.
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