Ghosts of the British Empire linger on in Bahrain

It was on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 that Rudyard Kipling penned his ‘Recessional’, a hymnic warning about the inevitable decline of the British Empire. “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/ Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!/Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,/Lest we forget – lest we forget!” wrote the poet of the Empire, as Britain’s redoubtable monarch marked 60 years on the throne.