The Romance of British Colonial Style

Romance may be mostly what's left of the colonial era, but what romance can assert, harsher facts may dispute. In this wishful album dedicated to what used to be pretty and can still be, the world of the memsahib is glorified and eulogized. We get glamorous glimpses, for example, of Karen Blixen's old washbasin, her Danish bed and her Kenyan verandah; looks at smoky railways used by the British to ``stitch together the Empire;'' and an awful lot of wicker furniture, sometimes with 19th-century colonials sitting on it. Sepia tones cool the volume and its interior vistas, redolent of comfort sought when the sun shone too fiercely. This gracefully designed picture book, with historical background appended in sentences, may not aim to give a sense of past life lived, and really doesn't. But as a visual aid to an escapist ideal, it is sumptuous and sufficient. (Sept.)