QUOTE : far too short a time for memories to lose their bite; quite long enough for the world to be turned on its head. Old families whose sons had died in Flanders sold their stately homes to war profiteers; the land was dotted with half-empty villages where the young men were dead and the young women gone; the cities and towns were full of hungry-eyed jobless men; the Empire that had covered a full quarter of the earth was beginning to look less like an immutable and unchanging truth and more like hubris, with nemesis attendant.