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Penultimate Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain

A return to the grand themes

Wm. Roger Louis
I.B. Tauris, 320pp, £35,

Raymond Carr

Wednesday, 30th January 2008

Raymond Carr reviews the new book from Wm. Roger Lewis

Indivar Kamtekar compares the experience of India and Britain during the 1939-45 war. The powerful British state could force an equality of sacrifice by taxing the rich and by the rationing and price control of food. The result was a more egalitarian society. In India the feeble colonial state could neither tax the rich nor prevent food prices from rocketing. In Britain the health of the poorer sectors of the population improved as never before. In India the agrarian poor starved to death.

Two major concerns of the book are the question of Britain’s decline and the possible end of Britain as a political unit when the Scottish Nationalist Party, albeit with a majority of only one in the rowdy Scottish parliament, promises independence for Scotland in the foreseeable future. Gordon Brown must have hoped that devolution — what we would have called Home Rule — would save the union. Home Rule did not keep the republic of Ireland in the United Kingdom of Great Britain. All over Europe generous Home Rule — now called autonomy — has failed to satisfy a demand for independence when confronted by a strong nationalist movement.

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Deadlier than the male

Andrew Taylor

When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so.