On the Governing of Empires

Finding Kristallnacht in an optician's chart, flushing heresy from "A Michelin Guide", procuring princesses courtesy of furnishings catalogues and constructing a guided tour of Bedlam from the names of British moths, Alasdair Paterson brings a Byzantine range of techniques - cut-and-mosaic, palimpsest dialectic, diplomatic transplant and induced mutation - to a series of innocent texts, most without a prior thought of poetry in their heads, to build an indispensable vademecum for the imperially and post-imperially inclined.