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Cambridge, November 1956. Students from India and Ceylon marched through the streets to protest the Anglo-French attack on Egypt. A crowd of English undergraduates, big men from the boat clubs and rugby fields, fell on them and started swinging. Benedict Anderson, twenty years old, a scholarship boy reading classics at King’s College, came upon the scene and tried to pull the attackers off. Someone knocked his glasses from his face. When it was over, the men who had done the beating stood in the street and sang “God Save the Queen.”
Anderson wrote in his memoir that nothing before had made him so angry. The scene held everything he later spent a career trying to understand: empire in its dying years, the racial line running through a university town, and the power of a national song to sanctify violence in the minds of comfortable young men. He had watched an anthem turn a mob into a congregation.
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