All The King’s Horses
M.R.A. Baig
THE LAST EMPEROR by Peter Townsend Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1976, 287 pp., £5.75
October 1976, volume 1, No 4

Sub-titled Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this book, by an ex-officer of the Royal Air Force who was an equerry of King George VI, is by any standards a remarkable book—full of information, political insights, and written in a most readable style. The author who from the vantage point of Buckingham Palace watched the dismantling of four pillars of the Empire—Ireland, India, Burma and Palestine, weaves the events at any one period of time in those four centuries so skillfully into one story that the reader feels that he too is a witness to the struggle for independence of these countries, foreign to the British in tradition and culture, and which resented allegiance to the British King-Em­peror and domination by Britain.

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