The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire
  • Published: 1 December 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409077961
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 848
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The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Dec 2010
Paperback
1 Dec 2008
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A brilliant, definitive and unique account of the eclipse of the British Empire.

No empire has been larger or more diverse than the British Empire. At its apogee in the 1930s, 42 million Britons governed 500 million foreign subjects. Britannia ruled the waves and a quarter of the earth's surface was painted red on the map. Yet no empire (except the Russian) disappeared more swiftly.

Within a generation this mighty structure collapsed, often amid bloodshed, leaving behind a scatter of sea-girt dependencies and a ghost of an empire, the Commonwealth, overshadowed by Imperial America. It left a contested legacy: at best a sporting spirit, a legal code and a near-universal language; at worst, failed states and internecine strife.

Full of vivid particulars, brief lives, telling anecdotes, comic episodes, symbolic moments and illustrative vignettes, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire is popular history at its scholarly best.
  • Published: 1 December 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409077961
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 848
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Piers Brendon

Piers Brendon is the author of more than a dozen books, including biographies of Churchill and Eisenhower, the best-selling Eminent Edwardians; The Windsors; The Dark Valley; The Hawker of Morwenstow; the highly acclaimed The Decline and Fall of the British Empire and, most recently, Eminent Elizabethans. He also writes for television and contributes frequently to the national press. Formerly Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre, he is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Also by Piers Brendon

Edward VIII (Penguin Monarchs)
Eminent Elizabethans
Eminent Edwardians
Hawker Of Morwenstow
Churchill
The Dark Valley
See all

Praise for The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire

A monumental new history

The Times

A provocative, marvellously readable account

Financial Times

Brilliant... A masterpiece of historical narrative. No review can hope to do justice to the depth of Brendon's research, the balance and originality of his conclusions, or the quality and humour of his prose. Our imperial story has been crying out for a top-flight historian who can write. Now it has one

Literary Review

In recent years the British Empire has been the subject of fresh scrutiny... Now Piers Brendon brings his own sharp eye to the debate... This he does superbly: with brio and panache and, often, a mordant wit...This is a real achievement and an important one

Independent

Magnificent...a narrative masterpiece. The settings are exotic, the cast of thousands full of the most eccentric, egotistical, paranoid, swashbuckling players you are likely to meet in any history

Richard Overy, Sunday Telegraph

The conquest of one quarter of the world's surface was, as Piers Brendon shows in disturbingly entertaining fashion, a story of massacre, famine, rape, torture and loot on a grand scale....Brendon with an acute eye for detail and the tragic-comic bon mot, serves up a veritable gorefest in which all sides slake their lusts

Scotland on Sunday

This is a huge and hugely impressive book, mighty in scale as its subject, elegantly written and rigorous in its research

Daily Telegraph