Ghosts of Empire by Kwasi Kwarteng

In this perceptive, wide-ranging book on the British Empire there is a “highly romanticised” portrait of Lord Kitchener standing imperiously outside the walls of Cairo. Perhaps more than any other military figure, at the zenith of empirical power, he represents British dominance of the world.

He went on to defend British interests in the Anglo-Boer War and is blamed — at least in South Africa — for the deaths of many women and children in the terrible conditions of what the Boers term the concentration camps.

Look more closely at Kitchener and you find an “idiosyncratic loner” who was at home only in the desert, an individual brilliant at Omdurman where 10,000 Dervishes were annihilated, but also a man of old-fashioned qualities as far removed from democracy as one can leap.

In a sense this is the core of Kwarteng's enterprising probe into Empire.

His major point is that it was ruled by amateurs with no coherent policy, men who did not think through their legacies into future eras, the “ghosts” of their follies being left for future generations to deal with.

While the Sudan may be the catalyst for this — it has taken 50 years for the south to become independent — Kwarteng takes us on a political and military odyssey through nations such as Iraq, Burma, Nigeria and Hong Kong, with cutting-edge portraits of many of the rulers.

One might argue that other countries might have been taken aboard while others did not deserve this critical assessment.

The book is a great achievement, however, with a theme not beloved of some historians with rose-coloured vision.

It is instead a brutally honest view of “hierachial” life dominated by Britain's class system, with the sporting blues of Oxbridge in the manly role of governorship.