‘a fine account … Empire was many things and Parker belongs to that vanishing minority that recognises this. What we have here is a fair appraisal of the life of the land, elegantly synthesised … By 1923, Parker shows with suggestive brilliance in his montage, empire was on its last legs.’
Times – Read full review
‘Brilliant … extraordinary … no attempt is made to shy away from the white supremacism at the core of the Empire’s mythology – but it also turns up glimpses of humanist benevolence and grand ambition. It is a book for serious people who can handle difficult moral contradictions, and will undoubtedly annoy zealots of all stripes.’
Telegraph – Read full review
‘deeply nuanced and incredibly readable’
Guardian
‘Superb … His research is prodigious, his mastery of detail impeccable … Although Parker places considerable weight on the darker side of empire — the violence, the condescension, the repression — he never hectors the reader, allowing the stories to speak for themselves.’
Sunday Times Read full review
‘A compelling read … Part of what makes this book such a fascinating read is that we all know what’s about to come, but since Parker sticks to his premise, we remain in a sense of suspense throughout … The end of empire does not come at the end of One Fine Day, but we leave with a much clearer sense of why its demise, if not inevitable, was certainly impending.’
Observer Book of the Week – Read full review
‘A sprawling account of the British empire …The portrait is achieved with a wide-angled lens, but the choice of a single day also brings focus … What emerges is a picture of an empire straining under the weight of its own contradictions. The British thought of their role as an enlightened one: stopping tribal warfare and introducing modern health care and education. Yet they brought forced labour and colonial massacres, racist rules, and substandard health care and education. Rather than simply stating so baldly, Mr Parker points this out through copious examples and meticulous research.’
Economist – Read full review
‘Lively … One Fine Day takes an engrossing trip round the British Empire.’ Daily Mail
‘A clever concept that works extraordinarily well … exhaustively researched and sensitively written One Fine Day is a superby nuanced snapshot of the British Empire at its apogee’ Literary Review
‘An impressive history … Parker has scoured newspapers, letters and diaries for nuanced, first-person accounts of the reality of empire’ New Statesman
‘The sheer range of Parker’s research in One Fine Day sets him apart from other historians … Parker’s book provides far more than just an Anglo-centric perspective on the British Empire. His reading of numerous local writers and politicians, ranging from Jawaharlal Nehru in India to Marcus Garvey in Jamaica, gives One Fine Day the kaleidoscopic dimension of a Ken Burns documentary.’
Air Mail Read full review
‘Parker is able to point to the simultaneity of a series of events across the Empire that point to a watershed in the ability of the British to keep it all together’
History Today
‘Well-written, nuanced account of the empire at its zenith, taking in rulers and ruled’
New Zealand Listener
‘Based on extensive research, we hear the views of both the coloniser and the colonised’
Irish Times
‘Hugely impressive in its research and balance’
Spectator
‘An epic portrait of the British Empire on the brink … Parker paints a brilliant picture, teeming with fresh faces and new voices.’
Jessie Childs
‘Breathtaking, extraordinarily rich and beautifully written. One Fine Day is a vital and important history that is truly global in scope and ambition. A wonderful read.’
Peter Frankopan
‘Extraordinary. Matthew Parker’s magisterial sweep through one day of British imperial history and culture plunges us into the global complexity of the British Empire, bringing the world of a century ago to fresh, vivid life. An astonishing achievement.’
Alex von Tunzelmann
‘An exquisitely crafted and beautifully written volume, full of delicious detail and extraordinary insight.’
Augustus Casely-Hayford
‘An engrossing and wide-ranging account of the zenith of the British Empire – with all the contradictions, brittleness, ambition and hubris that moment entailed. Across Continents and characters, Matthew Parker provides a new, global history of British imperialism which feels both epic and immediate.’
Tristram Hunt
‘Epic in scale yet intimate in detail, [Matthew Parker’s One Fine Day is] … a vast historical canvas on which each individual brushstroke had been brought vividly to life. A narrative triumph.’
Giles Milton
‘An engrossing read sprung from an impressive archival sweep. Parker tells the unwieldy story of empire through a microcosm, and in so doing captures it in all its chaotic contradictions. An impressive feat that few historians are capable of.’
David Veevers, author of The Great Defiance: How the World took on the British Empire
‘There is something Shakespearian about Matthew Parker’s insightful argument that it was at exactly the time that the British Empire reached its greatest territorial size that the factors coalesced which were to destroy it. Parker has rendered a signal service by convincingly pinpointing the exact fulcrum moment in its half-millennium long history.’
Andrew Roberts
‘[An] engrossing history which focuses on the empire’s zenith and full complexity, sweeping around the globe on a single day, transporting us from Ocean Island close to the International Date Line, via Orwell in Burma, election day in Nigeria, the imprisoned Marcus Garvey, Freetown’s Technical School for Girls, and many more episodes.’
Bookseller, Editor’s Pick
‘A century ago, on September 29, 1923, the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine took effect, folding the region into the British Empire and making the empire the largest it would ever be. (It covered a quarter of the globe.) But stirrings of independence among its diverse territories were already signaling its imminent unraveling. Historian Parker (Willoughbyland, 2017) takes an indepth look at the various and complex political, social, and cultural forces that structured the British Empire at its biggest, when it governed tiny Pacific and Caribbean islands as well as the Indian subcontinent. Sharp portraits of extraordinary personalities feature remarkable individuals like John Quayle-Dickson, a British commissioner who interceded on behalf of exploited native Banabans against a mining corporation on tiny and virtually waterless Ocean Island, only to summarily lose his posting, and, in India, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, who effectively challenged the Raj. Parker finds the seeds of imperial collapse even in the royal family’s dysfunction. This is a sweeping and intensely detailed history of Britain’s declining empire, the legacy of which still affects millions today.’
Mark Knoblauch Booklist
‘British historian Parker, author of Battle of Britain, Panama Fever, and other books, digs into the archives to create a multilayered portrait, with deep contextual background, of the British Empire in 1923. At the time, it “covered nearly 14 million square miles, 150 times the size of Great Britain and a quarter of the world’s land area. Four hundred and sixty million people, a fifth of the world’s population, [were] subjects of Britain’s King-Emperor George V.” Yet even at its apex, the empire was showing cracks in the facade, whether in Palestine, Cape Town, Nairobi, Sydney, Rangoon, or Jamaica, as the author illustrates incrementally through newspaper articles, diaries, documents, novels, and other sources. Trade had established British global supremacy, highlighted by the dominance of the British navy, yet World War I had ruptured the old order. Across the empire, the entire social and economic edifice, based largely on race and privilege, was being questioned. Parker astutely examines pieces of the empire in turn, exploring relevant economic, political, social, and racial developments. Australia, for example, where D.H. Lawrence had just published his novel Kangaroo, desperately needed to attract new settlers. The author also chronicles the journey of the dissipated Prince of Wales, who was touring multiethnic India followed by Malaya, where rubber was supplanting tin production and the attitude of British “paternalistic trusteeship” was uneasily on display. In addition to social and political figures, Parker investigates the work of authors such as Somerset Maugham, George Orwell, and E.M. Forster, who presented frankly critical depictions of the failing order. The author also introduces the first political movements to challenge the British government in India, Kenya, Nigeria, and the West Indies.
An impressive work of research and synthesis tracing the end of an empire.’
Kirkus
‘Historian Parker (Panama Fever) offers a panoramic view of the British Empire on September 29, 1923—the day Britain began administering the territories of Palestine and Transjordan and the empire reached its “maximum territorial extent”—in this portrait of a world on the cusp of sweeping change. Surveying critical colonial outposts ranging across half the globe, from the small, phosphate-rich Ocean Island, located “a short distance from the international dateline” in the Pacific, to Jamaica in the Caribbean Sea, Parker vividly demonstrates the empire’s vast reach and the “impossibly conflicting interests between government [and] the governed.” He juxtaposes colonial narratives told from positions of cultural authority within the empire, such as those of novelists E.M. Forester and George Orwell, with the work of anticolonial leaders, including India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Herbert Macaulay, the “Gandhi of Nigeria.” The inherent brutality of colonialism is evident in each region that Parker spotlights, providing a stark reminder that the goal of imperialism is to exploit faraway populations for the enrichment of the homeland. Accessible and sturdy, this expansive account provides solid ground for understanding the decline of the British Empire. It’s an eye-opening and a unique vantage point from which to study 20th-century history.’
Publishers Weekly
Matthew Parker 