Returning to my own vomit this morning – checking the 6^th edn of The Lion’s Share in order to respond to a request for permission to quote passages from it in an exam paper – I was struck by how well it reads. Pleased, yes; but also depressed.

Depressed, firstly because I know that I’ll never be able to write anything as good again, at 84, and with my memory and concentration spent; but also, secondly, because I despair of The Lion’s Share’s influence. One reason I wrote the book originally was to persuade readers of the complexities and nuances of a subject – ‘British imperialism’ – which was usually regarded simplistically, and exploited politically, by both Left and Right, in highly misleading ways. It was for this reason that from the very beginning (the 1970s) I conceived of it as a book for a ‘general’ readership – to be displayed for example in bookshop windows and at airports: a bit like Niall Ferguson’s later Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World – and not as a school or college textbook, which was how my publisher eventually marketed it. I think they tried to ride both horses, with an eye-catching jacket design for example (discarded in later editions); but by then Longmans had morphed into a predominantly ‘educational’ publisher – later called ‘Pearson Education’. And I have to admit that the book was well reviewed, sold very well under their imprint – hence the six editions – and made me a bit of money, as a textbook. But that’s not what I wanted.

Maybe it wasn’t opinionated or one-sided enough, as Ferguson’s book is. (That was presented – not altogether fairly – as pro-empire, against the contemporary anti-imperial trend.) Perhaps I was simply not so famous – or as pushy – as him. (I’m not good at self-advertisement.) Maybe I haven’t got the ‘common’ literary touch; although one of the comments I treasured most dearly was a postcard from one who had, the famous travel-writer Jan Morris, telling me that she had been ‘reading it in the bath and was unable to stop until the water was cold’. (Could I have used that in the ‘blurb’?) Perhaps the subtlety of my interpretation will have filtered through eventually, to people who were given it to read as a textbook at school or university. (Or in exam papers like the one I’m supposed to be checking now.) That’s what I cling on to. But how can I know?

All I can know is that it doesn’t seem to have affected at all the wider discussion of British imperialism, or of other topics where the idea of ‘empire’ is reckoned to be pertinent. The subject is still mainly seen in simplistic terms. You’re either ‘for’ or ‘against’ it: which in my view is not a very fruitful approach, if you want to understand anything. I was – and am – neither for nor against the British empire as such: although I joined anti-imperial groups when they were protesting against particular colonial ills – apartheid, for example, Rhodesia, and the Kenya camp atrocities. But the history of the empire overall is nowhere near as straightforward. It may be the moral complexity of my analysis that deprived me of the attention I sought.

But isn’t this the fate of most scholars and academics: to be ignored by the general public even when they are telling them useful – albeit complicated – things?