Churchill and Empire, by Lawrence James – a review

A fraught subject, this, and one which makes it difficult to sustain undiluted admiration for Churchill. Lawrence James is the doyen of empire historians, and has traced the great man’s engagement with the enormous fact of the British empire. What emerges is a sense of the individual nations being dealt with at the end of the day, when everything that really mattered had already been handled, and being subject to a series of trivial dismissals, outbursts of comic rage, and with little effort made to understand what might be an appropriate way to govern these immense territories.