This book is solid and occasionally interesting, but I doubt if it will change anyone’s life. It arises from a conference on the British World held in Melbourne in 2004, and is chiefly intended for historians and scholars of cultural studies. Even they, however, might appreciate some lightening of the texture by means of examples and illustrations. The impression of academics talking among themselves is underlined when phrases like ‘as is well known’ are used of facts which are not generally known. And despite the earnest and scholarly nature of the material, there are countless small infelicities, ambiguities and errors which a competent copy editor would have corrected.

Of the eleven chapters a few stand out, not because their subjects are more compelling, but because their authors have preferred elegance and clarity of expression to jargon. Stephen Banfield, asking whether music can enlighten us about the British diaspora, disarmingly admits that ‘to a musicologist … this is a painful question’, but one that can be answered in the affirmative as he examines British exports of organs, music exams and musicians. John MacKenzie manages to make a study of the Scots in Cape Town more lively than the topic might suggest; David Goodman mounts a thoughtful argument about Anglophobia and Anglophilia in the United States; and Stuart Ward’s study of changes to national symbols in three Commonwealth countries in the 1960s is cogent and well written.