Definitely a slog to read. A sense of its importance carried me on. I kind of knew that the British said noble things to the home audience about the Empire and did beastly things to the people in their colonies. It's another thing to be immersed in year after year of horrible detail. There's an awful fascination in the way methods of torture and oppression travelled from place to place, such as Ireland, Kenya, and Palestine. I did not know that the Americans pressured the British to make good on the claim that they were teaching their colonies to be self-governing. Nor did I know how badly the handover of power to nearly independent countries was bollixed in most places.

Well, it's not like we thought empires were nice to everyone.