MixedThe New StatesmanHeffer shows a love for the landed gentry, an affectionate joshing of the middle class – keep at it, you’ll get there, chaps – but a caution bordering on bewilderment for the working class. He sees unrest not as a positive working out of aspirations, but as the failing of \'a ruling class whose decadence had provoked the often successful challenges of the Labour movement\' ... The idea that workers were misled into socialism by middle class agitators was indeed a contemporary view but it was not true ... The notion that middle-class left wingers were \'often fuelled by class guilt\' is more pencil-sucking than analysis ... One of the problems of this account is too much reliance on received wisdom – Heffer is not sufficiently familiar with the terrain of Labour activism, as he is with the machinations of parliamentary grandees ... There is much to enjoy in this long account ... At around 325,000 words it is an enormous, spine-straining work. This bulk shows its cost in the quality of writing, which is never poor, but lacks the vigour of, say, George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England covering a part of this period and which Heffer cites approvingly.
David Gilmour
PositiveNew Statesman\"... impressive ... Gilmour writes about the viceroys and governors, but also about men and women at lower levels ... This is a rich and nuanced social history that does not treat every British footstep on the subcontinent as if it were a step on the way to the Amritsar massacre. That does not make it an imperial whitewash. Gilmour throws an interesting light on the massacre of 379 unarmed Indians in 1919, which punched a hole in the claim of British rule to moral authority.\
