The story runs from the Thirties to some three years after Chris Patten’s handover to China. “The future is more important than the past,” says the last character to speak. Encoded in that statement is a betrayal.The book has three narrative voices, all first-person This gives the author a problem The first is a lightweight, and the others are sententious. After a brief flash-forward, we begin in the present day; a journalist called Dawn Stone tells us her life so far.A favour – an implausible one – has taken Dawn from a job on a local paper in Blackpool to the diary column on a national, and onward to a post as a features editor Dawn is slick and chippy, with faded ladette locutions.

(At one point she is “horny”.) Why make a character you have so little time for? She may indeed be an accurate representation of a type, but accurately described characters don’t necessarily pull their weight in a novel.When she heads off to a lucrative magazine post in Hong Kong, we hope the cynic will be eaten by bigger dogs; but as we had feared, she settles in to suck their bones.After the allied victory, Stewart builds up his hotel business, while coming to terms with every local variety of graft and criminality Maria continues her missionary work. When she vanishes, a Triad victim, it is of more account to Stewart than to the reader, whose nerves are shredded by her awesome rectitude. The pay-off from their polite passion becomes clear in a final section, which introduces a third voice.Her boss in Hong Kong is a powerful and sinister Chinese billionaire; but he was a mere village boy in the Thirties, when he became the prot? of a hotelier, Tom Stewart. The book’s second narrative strand finds Stewart as a young adventurer, a callow English boy sailing east for the first time On the voyage he becomes the subject of a curious wager. A missionary nun, the Chinese sister Maria, bets that she can teach him Cantonese in six weeks. She wins; her success is to have the greatest impact on his fate. He falls in love with her, of course, but it is not clear what he does about it.Though he is the son of a Kent publican, and had never been much east of Whitstable in early life, Stewart has inherited or acquired the emotional insufficiency of the Empire-building upper-class male.

When the war breaks out, and he is beaten, tortured and interned, he acts like a hero, but expresses little more than a mild rancour towards the Japanese.Were our ancestors really so passionless and correct, or is it a lazy half-lie, sanctified by usage? Did Englishmen never cry? If not, how far through their old Empire did the constraint extend? The reader may remember David Malouf’s Australian prisoners in his 1990 war novel, The Great World: recall their monstrous, pitiful humanity, and the drama and passion of their stories. Malouf left his readers rolling in ashes; Lanchester’s are left ceremoniously bowing, and picking lint from their sleeves.After the allied victory, Stewart builds up his hotel business, while coming to terms with every local variety of graft and criminality Maria continues her missionary work. His capacity for love, he says himself, is “elusive and equivocal” and his experience of grief is that it is numbing and passive, “something one undergoes rather than something one undertakes”.That is precisely the experience the novel offers: a passive one. There is pleasure in Lanchester’s intelligent and measured prose, and in his rapid, seemingly expert analysis of a volatile and intriguing region.After the allied victory, Stewart builds up his hotel business, while coming to terms with every local variety of graft and criminality Maria continues her missionary work. WH Auden’s poem “The Shield of Achilles” was a depiction of the awfulness of 20th-century mass warfare, set against a more heroic, classical vision. The relationship between society and war may now be taking new turns. That is the starting point of this blockbuster on the history and future of the modern state.

I opened it with dread, due mainly to an extreme suspicion of grand surveys propounding a theory to explain the past, present and future of international politics. Truth is more chaotic, more varied, and comes in smaller packages. However, after reading this extraordinary study my enduring suspicion is tempered by more than sneaking respect for the author and his achievement. He has been a visiting fellow in Oxford and London; has held senior posts on national security in Washington, in both Democratic and Republican administrations; and has written books on subjects as varied as nuclear strategy, social choice and constitutional law. All this experience and range of interests come together in this book. “Only connect” could be its motto.Bobbitt’s main thesis is that the constitutional system of a state is inextricably entwined with its perception of war. This link between what he calls the “inner and outer faces” of the state has frequently been ignored, not least by academics.