Isn’t Paxo’s series on the British Empire brilliant TV? Gone is the weary contempt that he wears on Newsnight. Instead, he is visibly enthused by talking to ordinary people in far flung lands. Paxman isn’t telling a new story, but he’s a gifted spinner of old yarns. Pottering around a spice market in Calcutta, going to the races in Hong Kong, meeting the relatives of mill workers in Lancashire, beating sugar cane with the descendants of slaves in Jamaica, having tiffin with the great-grandson of the Mahdi in Khartoum — there is an air of the sahib about Paxman, but he has the common touch.
Empire is our book of the month. Its weakness is that it does not fully explain that the empire was an elite project. Similarly, the television series devotes most of its time to the heroes (or villains depending on your sensitivities) of empire: Morgan, Clive, Raffles, Burton, Gordon, Lawrence: rather than the policy-makers: Pitt the Elder, Castlereagh, Disraeli, Joseph Chamberlain and Churchill.
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