Cruel Britannia A historian looks at Britain’s fraught race relations – and their complex relationship with class – through the lens of empire

To a certain kind of imperial historian, empire is everywhere. Like latter-day John Hobsons, they believe they alone are keeping alive the anti-imperial tradition, courageously defying the curmudgeonly nostalgics sipping gin and tonic in the home counties like nabobs of old. But Hobson wrote his famous Imperialism: A Study in 1902, when empire was approaching its zenith and few among his peers counted as anti-imperialist. The same cannot be said of his contemporary heirs.

“Britain is in denial,” Charlotte Lydia Riley tells us. “The British people as a whole