Will Britain ever recover its imperial mojo?

Jessica Douglas-Home’s A Glimpse of Empire (Michael Russell) has one of those provocatively old-fashioned titles guaranteed to alienate the kind of people who enjoy Woman’s Hour, You And Yours and Jon Snow on Channel 4 News. But that’s not the only reason you should give it to someone you love this Christmas.

No, the main one is that — apart from being charming, exquisitely but unshowily written, beautifully observed and handsomely illustrated with period photographs and etchings — it magically transports you to a much better world.

That world is the last days of the Raj and, specifically, the 1911 Royal Durbar in which the new King, George V, travelled to Delhi to be proclaimed Emperor of India. It was a controversial decision, the first time since Richard ‘Coeur de Lion’ that an English king had left Europe. But George was determined to do what his father and grandmother never managed: to attend the Durbar in person.

The Royal Durbar was an invention of Disraeli’s: a symbolic pageant designed to show the Indians who was boss. All the princes, maharajas, begums and gaekwars would parade before the Imperial power and pledge their loyalty. In return, they would get the opportunity to outdo the British in magnificence and excess (one maharaja had to be banned from bringing his pet tigers), while demonstrating to their subjects just how respected by and ‘in’ they were with their supposed colonial masters.

It was a neatly symbiotic relationship — not unakin to the one that kept the Roman Empire thriving for so many centuries. As long as the local rulers played the game they could carry on pretty much as if the British weren’t there. In the case of the Maharaja of Patiala, for example, this meant observing the splendid family tradition whereby once a year he had to appear before his subjects naked save for a breastplate composed of 1,001 brilliant blue-white diamonds and sporting — as an earthly manifestation of the God Shiva’s sacred phallic form — an enormous, throbbing stiffy.