The British Empire was the nearest thing there has ever been to a world government. Yet its mode of operation was a triumph of minimalism. - Niall Ferguson

As the Cold War entered its hottest phase in the 1960s, United States and the Soviet Union vied with one another to win the support of independence movements in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. What Harold Macmillan called ‘the winds of change’ when he toured Africa in 1960 blew not from Windhoek or Malawi but from Washington and Moscow. Tragically, they often blew away colonial rule only to replace it with Civil War.

There were Chernobyl-like features of the way that the United States handled the [Covid] pandemic, in particular the reluctance of the responsible officials ever to admit any responsibility for any of the things that went wrong.

In 1615 the British Isles had been an economically unremarkable, politically fractious and strategically second-class entity. Two hundred years later Great Britain had acquired the largest empire the world had ever seen, encompassing forty-three colonies in five continents.