It is such an obvious subject for a book. The two most powerful peoples in the world in the past thousand years have been the Chinese-speaking and the English-speaking peoples, and in the past hundred years those speaking English have been the more influential. While Winston Churchill wrote four volumes, which were bestsellers in their time, on the history of the English-speaking peoples up to the year 1901, I know of no other book which has surveyed this century of their greatest power.

The book can’t have been easy to research and write: it is a big hamburger of a theme. The countries whose main language is English differ in size and influence, they are far apart and their loyalties are often in conflict. An historian who is a specialist on Britain is very unlikely to be also an authority on, say, the United States or New Zealand. Moreover, a historian tackling this theme has to be interested in military, political, economic and social history – now a rare combination of interests, academically.