This book is the product of a decade of rumination on the author’s own PhD thesis and the themes and ideas therein, which now appear to have gained a new and unexpected currency. 

At first glance it is a history of a period where upper and upper-middle class white men were concerned with how to make London an appropriate imperial capital. This at a time when, in spite of, or perhaps, because of the Great War, the British Empire looked as though it might last forever. 

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