Tristram Hunt reviews his parliamentary colleague Kwasi Kwarteng’s book, Ghosts
of Empire.
‘Ghosts of Empire marks a return to traditional, Tory scepticism shorn of ideology and purpose. There is little rhyme or rhythm to this history; it is a tale of chaps doings things and then
other things happening, mostly to foreigners. Which is both its strength and weakness.
Holding together his chronicle on the end of empire in Iraq, Kashmir, Sudan, Nigeria, Burma and Hong Kong is Kwarteng’s thesis of “anarchic individualism”. In essence, there was too much
autonomy given to imperial agents on the ground. “Officials often developed one line of policy only for successors to overturn it and pursue a completely different approach. This was a source
of chronic instability in the Empire.”
And here was where the “ghosts” of empire were laid. David Cameron used a recent trip to Pakistan to suggest that many of the world’s problems could be blamed on British imperial policy,
and Kwarteng offers up the data. Again and again, British officials made wrong choices at crucial moments in both empire building and decolonisation with terrible long-term
consequences.’
Tom McCarthy, author of C, tells the Guardian’s Edinburgh book festival podcast that writing has nothing to do with self-expression.
Philip Horne traipses through the Alfred Kazin’s journals, a rare slice of 20th Century life.
‘The book is not a journal,” Alfred Kazin wrote of his journal in 1944, “it is an exercise book, a disorderly pile of shavings.” Despite this, his intimate journals are now
a book, a hefty one, recording a smallish world that seemed very important to itself (and to many others) in the century just past.
The author of A Walker in the City(1951), New York Jew (1978) andAn American Procession (1984) hardly retains the intellectual reputation of some of the people with whom he consorted – Robert
Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov – but in his Fifties and Sixties heyday, after Wasp cultural dominance had crumbled, Kazin was the source
for the latest word on Mailer or Bellow or Malamud. “Who can doubt,” he wrote in 1958, “the immense cultural authority of all us Jewish writers and critics?”’
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