British and American troops often found themselves in equivocal positions. The forced expulsion, to certain death in the USSR, of Cossacks and other Soviet vassals who had fought for Germany tortured many consciences in the summer of 1945. Like Germans before them, Allied troops "were only following orders": but these orders had been formulated by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta. This was realpolitik of the most bitter kind, forced on Western leaders by the need to placate the Soviets. And, however shameful, it was horribly eclipsed by what was beginning to unfold across Communist-occupied Eastern Europe.

The Germans had fought to the bitter end, but the Japanese surrender, after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, left huge swathes of Asia and the Pacific still occupied by their forces. The Americans did not wish to police former European colonies, and left Malaya, Indochina and Indonesia to the British. American policy was anti-imperialist, and they gave little or no material support.

Here Buruma's narrative fails to convince. He refers briefly and slightingly to British efforts to restore the colonial power in Indochina and Indonesia. For a Dutchman, his account of the events in Java is both thin and inaccurate, and ignores the pressing need to locate and succour hundreds of thousands of military and civilian prisoners.

Buruma largely ignores the events in Soviet-occupied Europe, for which you would need to read Anne Applebaum's excellent Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956. He leaves the high-level diplomacy until the very end, to some extent stripping these tens of millions of extraordinary human stories of context. But they are extraordinary stories nevertheless, and they are deftly told. This was how the modern world began, with a great cacophony of bangs and whimpers, and Buruma brilliantly captures the echo.