Status Updates From Pax Britannica: The Climax ...

I have tried for like 5 years to finish this book. It is such a different beast from the first volume in the series, which moves along at a good clip while keeping you deeply engaged in the chronological narrative. I struggle with this book because it focusses only on one year: 1897. I find the lack of a chronological narrative to be really hard to follow. The short vignettes and idylls are good, but get same-y.

“I have a strong fellow-feeling for a craftsman who said of his most successful work, Derby Day, that the acrobats, the nigger minstrels, gypsy fortune tellers, to say nothing of carriages filled with pretty women, together with the sporting element, seemed to offer abundant material for the line of art to which I felt obliged… to devote myself”

Sometimes the past really is another country…

“Austin was apparently impervious to criticism, and this is lucky, for nobody has had a good word for him since his death in 1913.”

Oof

Ireland as the Empire's oldest and most curdled of British colonies. Not submitting even after hundreds and hundreds of years of occupation and mismanagement. Morris is much less breezy here than in other places where she's used acid wit to make subtle pointse

The peace maintained over the Empire by constant small wars. Indian Brit army more effective. Ferocious small campaigns by over worked army, no quarter given in places like Afghanistan, all pris killedeon both sides.

A melancholy discontented Canada, almost a country in 1897, a mixed bag result for the Empire so intent on planting mini me's over the world...

On Kipling. The writer of Empire - above all others. Reporter, critic and cheerleader.

Just how hetrogenous the British Empire was at its height.

"In general the British respected indigenous laws, where they made sense, and seemed just: within their own islands, after all, they allowed a quaint degree of legal latitude to the Scots." With a English mother and Scottish father, lines like this make me want to punch myself in the face.

By Jingo! Jingoism is coined in a British music hall song. Stunning to thinj how much of today's world comes from the British Empire. NORTH Americ entirely, though the Yanks rebelled. Written 50 years ago, I'm sort of glad Morris is only focusing on the Brit side - though dark allusions to the bloodshed and pain of the countries and people sucked into this money making machine.