A book about the British Empire may seem politically incorrect in Hong Kong now, given the push to rediscover the SAR's Chinese identity. But it surely makes fascinating reading.
The British Century: A photographic history of the last hundred years by Brian Moynahan (Random House, $650) is an eye-opener through both its photographs and extraordinary parts of the text, perhaps more in small detail than the big picture.
Take, for instance, the information that in World War I, with its mud-filled trenches and horror of the Somme and similar battles, 'only officers were thought mentally refined enough to suffer from shellshock, or breakdown . . . 'What a lesson it is to read the thoughts of men,' a Balliol-educated subaltern wrote after censoring his men's mail, 'often as refined and sensitive as we have been made by birth and education, yet living under conditions much harder and more disgusting than my own.' ' It follows other works in the series, including The Chinese Century by historian Jonathan Spence, which contained rare photographs spanning that huge country and its last, turbulent 100 years.
In the same way, many of the pictures carried in The British Century are published for the first time.
But to this reader, the overwhelming image the book conveys, from brutal beatings of colonial slaves to 1980s pictures of the slum tower blocks of Liverpool burning in the Toxteth riots while so-called Sloane rangers quaffed Champagne in London nightclubs, is of the privileged pressing down those less fortunate to raise themselves ever-higher.
A disturbing and deeply fascinating look at British life as it was and is.