The Pax Britannica trilogy is Jan Morris’s masterly telling from the Uk Empire from your accession of Queen Victoria towards the death of Winston Churchill. It is a towering achievement: informative, available, entertaining and created with all her usual bravura. This last volume graphs the decline and dissolution of what was after the largest empire the world had known. From your first signs of decay in the imperial ambition in the Boer Wars, through the global shifts in power evident in both World Wars, it includes a perspective that’s honest, evocative and occasionally elegiac.