PanThe Guardian (UK)The broadcast conceit doesn’t translate well on the page, leaving the author exposed ... On the theme of politics, Barnes seems to be on the defensive ... Ultimately it is not just these niggles of inconsistency, but the sense of writing forced to fit a frame that is altogether too neat that left me cold. Who knows, though – a future reread might do the trick. Perhaps when I reach his age, in half a century, I’ll have changed my mind too.
Charlotte Lydia Riley
MixedThe Guardian (UK)Imperial Island rests on the assumption that racism in postwar Britain is self-evidently the upshot of colonialism ... The causal link, though, isn’t nearly as neat as Riley suggests. Arguably, she’s got it backwards ... Imperial Island may disappoint as \"a history of empire in modern Britain\", as the subtitle has it, but it nevertheless succeeds as a history of race relations ... But there is a habit of talking down to the reader, spelling out obvious ironies and rephrasing quotes just in case we lack the moral clarity to recognise enormities for what they are.
Hannah Durkin
RaveThe Times (UK)A remarkably wide-ranging book taking in everything from science to soft drinks to show how slavery’s insidious hand wormed its way into the very fabric of American life.
Nandini Das
PositiveThe Times (UK)A scholarly biography with an antiquary’s eye for detail. Das’s leisurely diversions into the world of Jacobean fashion, food and curiosities are fascinating ... Das works through irony and implication, showing how the 17th century had little time for the finer humanitarianism of our age.
Joseph Sassoon
MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksAn exhaustive tome ... I am not entirely persuaded by this tale of bourgeois betrayal. It’s a familiar trope and one as lazy as the character flaw it indicts. For one thing, it seriously underestimates aristocratic inventiveness ... Sassoon is drawn to neat moral narratives, which come at the expense of economic explanations ... All the same, the tale of bons vivants makes for riveting storytelling, if not terribly sound business history. Readers will take away a great deal of British and Asian modern history from Sassoon’s globetrotting account.
