Britain's Gulag

This is the once and continuing dark side we can never escape - or honestly acknowledge...this is where we have been and may stray again

Peter Preston, Observer

It is a story which has never before been told...It is a story of unremitting brutality, rape and torture

Christopher Hudson, Daily Mail

The Mau Mau did not get the recognition due to them...and Britain never got the comeuppance it deserved. Half a century later, a 'revisionist' historian like [Niall] Ferguson, seeking to rehabilitate the empire after a decent interval, could still blithely ignore the whole affair. This is no longer an option...Elkins [has] seen to that

Bernard Porter, London Review of Books

[A] vital study... shocking

Ian Critchley, Sunday Times

A tale of systematic violence and high-level cover-ups

Guardian

Caroline Elkins has starkly illuminated one of the darkest secrets of late British imperialism. She has shown how, even when they profess the most altruistic of intentions, empires can still be brutal in their response to dissent by subject peoples. We all need reminding of that today

Niall Ferguson

Given the number and nature of the atrocities that filled the 20th century, the degree of brutality and violence perpetrated by British settlers, police, army and their African loyalist supporters against the Kikuyu during the Mau Mau period should not be surprising. Nor, perhaps, the fact that the British government turned a blind eye, and later covered them up. What is surprising, however, is that it has taken so long to document the whole ghastly story-this is what makes Caroline Elkins's disturbing and horrifying account so important and memorable

Caroline Moorehead