Is it true that there's no place like home?

Twenty years ago this month, Hong Kong was returned to China - an event that is often considered to mark the formal end of the British Empire.

Yet there seems to be some reluctance, back home in the United Kingdom, to admit that the British hegemony of the 19th and early 20th centuries is now a thing of the past.

Last year's European Union membership referendum provided ample evidence of this, with the Brexit vote won, at least in part, because of a certain xenophobic nostalgia for the "good old days".