This is, in a way, a travel book, but one which travels as much in time as it does in space. It is divided into four sections, with memoirs arranged under the headings "Imperial England", "Colonial Africa", "Indian Nationalism" and "Postcolonial America"; the extracts are generous, to put it mildly, and although they are taken, especially in the first two instances, from books which are already well known in their own right - Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, or Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa - putting them in close proximity creates an extraordinarily vivid, and vividly female, picture of a period in history which we are rather more used to reading about as chronicled by men. The experiences are various, but the writing is consistently passionate and unflinchingly self-aware.
