But I thought this was interesting, from a reader:

I finished reading a book by Niall Ferguson, “Empire, The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power”. At the end of your post you wrote: Me: Note: I neither affirm nor denounce this historical interpretation. I just know — from years of experience — that this is the sort of thing that sets off history buff brouhahas that at this late cocktail hour I have no interest in refereeing. On page 292, Mr. Ferguson wrote: “What such attitudes implied for the future of the British Empire was made blatantly clear in an open letter by the editors of Life magazine ‘to the People of England’, published in October 1942: ‘One thing we are sure we are not fighting for is to hold the British Empire together. We don’t like to put the matter so bluntly, but we don’t want you to have any illusions. If your strategists are planning a war to hold the British Empire together they will sooner or later find themselves strategizing all alone’.* Later, on the same page: Naively trusting of Stalin, positively sycophantic towards the Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, Roosevelt was deeply suspicious of Churchhill’s unreconstructed imperialism. As the President saw it: ‘The British would take land anywhere in the world, even if it were only a rock or a sand bar’. *General Smuts replied in an interview for Life the following December that the Commonwealth was ‘the widest system of organized human freedom which has ever existed in human history’. On page 293 : On one occasion, Roosevelt pressed Churchill to hand back Hong Kong to China as a gesture of ‘goodwill’. He had the temerity to bring up the question of India, at which Churchill erupted, retorting that an international team of inspection should be sent to the American South.