Imperial islandAfter World War II, Britain's overseas empire disintegrated. But over the next seventy years, empire came to define Britain as never before. From immigration and race riots, to the Suez Crisis and the Falklands War, from the simplistic moral equation of Band Aid to the invasion of Iraq, the imperial mindset has dominated Britain's relationship with itself and the world. The ghosts of empire are there, too, in the tragedy of Stephen Lawrence and in the

I only try on one of Nina's pristine white dresses once

But when Easy is approached by a shell-shocked Vietnam War veteran - a young white man who claims to have gotten into a fight protecting a white woman from a black man - he knows he shouldn't take the case

or from the disease and hunger rife in the concentration camp

a dazzling story offering up mystery

but soon finds himself at the heart of a dark Jesuit conspiracy - and in pursuit of a killer

race and star-crossed love can change two families's lives forever

In the first half of the book

Book I begins in the city of Pompeii shortly before the eruption of Vesuvius

surrounded by jostling physicists and media

first under the watchful eye of Stalin

Yet their medical and organisational skills were so impressive that in 1915 Flora and Louisa were asked by the War Ministry to return to London and establish a new military hospital in a vast and derelict old workhouse in Covent Garden's Endell Street

one of the Windrush generation who became a member of the House of Lords