Recently married, my wife Dorothy and I made the long four-and-a-half-week journey from London in the P & O liner, the SS Strathmore, travelling the great British imperial route—Gibraltar, Port Said, Aden, Bombay, Colombo, Singapore, Perth—in its last days, just a year before the Suez crisis. (This may be as good a place as any to note that Irving is a great admirer of the British empire. Kipling is one of his favourite poets, and Zulu—depicting the epic of Rorke’s Drift, where a handful of redcoats fought off a Zulu army—his all-time favourite movie. One of his few disappointments with the United States, I suspect, is that it is constitutionally and temperamentally unsuited to sustaining the burdens of an imperial mission.)