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.
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