One wet autumn night in 1951, the travel writer Peter Fleming – the elder and, at that point, more famous brother of Ian – was leaving the theatre when he heard a woman ask her companion to dinner to meet “a friend back from Rangoon”.

This fleeting snatch of conversation prompted Fleming to write a celebrated essay about how isolated and provincial postwar, post-imperial Britain had suddenly become. Twenty years earlier, he realised, half his friends and contemporaries would have been working in such cities across the British empire.