postimperial

It's a postimperial bad dream in which Arabs restore houses and punks destroy them.

Still, architecture was feeding off the same postimperial energy that had stirred those antic waves.

Cannadine wants to overhaul the monarchy, but only to adapt it to downscaled, postimperial times.

Similarly they are comparatively recently postimperial.

By these methods Macmillan succeeded in postponing for a decade the days of reckoning for postimperial Britain.

Gradually, one realizes that Naipaul is trying something different, that his interest lies in the dailiness of this late colonial world, not its postimperial crises.

THE nation-state is a creation of empire, but for a generation of postimperial subjects the legacy of colonialism has been one of homelessness and exile.

But Hiney belongs to the postimperial generation, for whom exotic places, with all their disparity of wealth and custom on display, are a commonplace of undergraduate junkets.

Their history, he reminds us, goes back much farther than does that of the modern state - that fact alone provides reason to question politically correct claims that we live in a postimperial age.

Now he has brought those ideas to Bermuda, where he is one of a handful of restaurateurs who are trying to sweep the cobwebs out of this island's stagnant postimperial kitchens.

On the new imperial frontier, in places like Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo, American military power, together with European money and humanitarian motives, is producing a form of imperial rule for a postimperial age.

Mr. Cannadine's book also stresses that empire is crucial to an understanding of 19th- and 20th-century British history - and also of contemporary history, as Britain still gropes for a useful role in its depleted postimperial world.

The price of political quiescence is most clearly revealed in the collective failure to respond to the Yugoslav tragedy - a baneful reminder of Europe's tidily forgotten past in the one region where history had not resolved the postimperial muddle of peoples and states.

For although obeisances are paid to the postimperial sleepwalk of both the Soviet Union and the United States, Arkady Renko has more intimate concerns: crime, passion, how men learn to live with each other, the balance in every life that leaves people stranded between dark comedy and tragedy.