ABSTRACT
Historians who seek to show how the empire permeated all aspects of British life and thought have turned to the realm of popular recreation. With reference to a variety of cultural forms – art, exhibitions, film, music halls and radio – they have argued that imperialism was a ‘core ideology’ in British society. 1 There is much to commend their work. It gets away from the self-contained critiques of British culture that were for too long the dominant mode of modern British historiography; and it brings out more forcefully than any other branch of scholarship the excitement and sheer spectacle of empire to a generation for whom leisure and entertainment were becoming more widely available.
