Imperial measures

It’s been a heavyweight week on Radio 4 with the start of the annual series of Reith Lectures and a talk on empire by Jan Morris, and thank heavens for that. We need serious, we need facts, we need to think in these trying times, beset as they are by Love Island and persistent presidential tweeting. As it happens, both talks were given by women, and I can’t help wondering whether their gender has something to do with the way neither of them plugged a definite line but instead suggested there are more ways than one of looking at things.

On Wednesday morning Morris looked back at Britain’s imperial past in her own inimitable fashion, calling her programme The British Empire: An Equivocation (produced by Gareth Jones). It was as curious a half-hour as the title suggests, part-documentary, part-reminiscence, and almost like a Desert Island Discs of empire, with a selection of music inspired by Mandalay, Shalimar, and the imperial project. Snatches of Elgar, Walton and Vera Lynn were interwoven with Morris’s memories and reflections.

She was born in 1926 when Britain was still at the heart of an empire that encompassed one third of the world’s landmass and governed one eighth of its inhabitants, an astonishing feat for such a small island. No doubt it was exploitative and corrupted by ‘coarse chauvinism’ but, argues Morris, there’s also something fascinating about its enterprise. Her first encounter with empire was in Cairo in the 1940s where she saw both its manifestations — the kindly civil servant on his way to work, British through and through, but also utterly at home amid the Egyptian crowds; and the British army colonel who kicked the young Arab blocking his way, ‘literally kicked him in the seat of his pants’.