Empire of the Mind: A Journey Through Great Britain

`Iqbal Ahmed’s Empire of the Mind is an elegant epistle of
disillusion. Though he arrives in Britain hoping to find what his US
guidebook describes as the “genuinely most civilised” country, Iqbal
discovers it has “one of the world’s largest prison populations”. Feeling
similarly circumscribed, he brilliantly observes the chilly, rootless life
lived by many immigrants. A snack on Bournemouth Pier sums up the seedy
blandness of the former hub of empire: “The chips were tasty but the fish
didn’t seem so fresh. Evidently that didn’t matter” ‘