The reheated Weberism – a sign of Ferguson’s nostalgia for the intellectual certainties of the summer of 1914 – turns into another lament for Western civilisation, whose decline is proclaimed everywhere by the fact that the churches are empty, taxes on our wealth are high, the ‘thrifty asceticism’ of Protestants of yore has been lost, and ‘empire has become a dirty word.’

It reads very assuredly on high finance – Ferguson's true field. (He came into imperial history accidentally – invited, again, by TV.) For anyone expecting an imperialist rant – Ferguson has a certain reputation along these lines – the chapter that covers colonial Africa will come as a surprise. Africa "brought out the destructive worst in Europeans . . . The rapid dissolution of the European empires in the postwar years appeared to be a just enough sentence".