short, there is a popular view that if you don’t celebrate the empire you’re ‘anti-British’. And along with the demand that I be more ‘grateful’ for what Britain has given me (which I get whenever I comment critically on any aspect of British life), the suggestion that I am insulting Britain has been a common reaction to any comments I have made in public about the dark chapters of British empire, a reflex which is in itself, as we established a few chapters ago, a symptom of imperialism.
