Honest and evocative, George Orwell's first novel is an examination of the debasing effect of empire on occupied and occupier.
Burmese Days focuses on a handful of Englishmen who meet at the European Club to drink whisky and to alleviate the acute and unspoken loneliness of life in 1920s Burma—where Orwell himself served as an imperial policeman—during the waning days of British imperialism.
One of the men, James...

A mansion filled with Western art in the center of old Calcutta, the Mughal emperor's letters in an archive in the French Alps, the names of Italian adventurers scratched into the walls of Egyptian temples. In this book, Jasanoff delves into the stories behind vestiges such as these to uncover the lives of people who lived on the frontiers of the British Empire during a pivotal century of its formation. She traces the exploits of collectors to tell...

The imperial aspect of Churchill's career tends to be airbrushed out, while the battles against Nazism are heavily foregrounded. A charmer and a bully, Winston Churchill was driven by a belief that the English were a superior race, whose goals went beyond individual interests to offer an enduring good to the entire world. No better example exists than Churchill's resolve to stand alone against a more powerful Hitler in 1940 while the world's democracies...

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian: a searing study of the British Empire that interrogates the country's pervasive use of violence throughout the twentieth century and traces how these practices were exported, modified, and institutionalized in colonies around the globe"--