I found this, the third in the series, most enjoyable and engaging. I was very happy with the series as a whole and appreciated the wealth of information in its pages.

Entertaining and fast-flowing as expected from the previous installments. Again, the focus is on great men (the suffragettes get a brief mention), but here perhaps even more pronouncedly on just Churchill. Winston takes about a third of the audiobook. Also, the book practically ends with the 1940s. Events after WWII get 37 minutes out of the 23+ hours, so the 1776-2000 in the title is misleading. Luckily there are good popular books out there on more recent British history.

The last 100 years were a tad Orwell-heavy, which may bother some, but otherwise this was a well-written, readable, memorable and compact history of these isles.

I've read all three volumes. My only criticism is that by the end of the second world war, the author seems to run out of steam and is in a rush to finish. But otherwise a really great anthology of British history.

A history that is rigorous and heartfelt, hugely critical from a position of fond attachment. I wish I'd read this earlier.

3.5 stars actually. More readable than the previous 2 volumes, probably because the material was more familiar, thus compensating for the very broad sweep and the occasionally odd choice of viewpoint (poets and writers in this one). Some factual errors: the Spanish POUM of George Orwell fame were communists, not anarchists. Operation Torch was the invasion of North Africa, not Italy. And some questionable opinions: Churchill is mildly criticised for advocating, as First Sea Lord in 1914, that the Royal Navy's ships be run on oil, not coal, thus condemning Britain to a dependence on Middle Eastern oil. However, oil-fuelled ships were faster and had a longer range...….and coal-fuelled ships were still dependent on vulnerable coaling stations. And a motorised army and air force would also need oil, coal-fuelled aeroplanes being somewhat impractical. And a section on British "butcher" generals of WWI names Haig (obvs) and...…. Sir Henry Wilson. Eh ??? There are many reasons to regard Wilson's contribution to WWI as somewhat unfortunate for Britain, but his brief spell as GOC IV Corps is hardly the most striking. And there were far worse butchers and blunderers than him: Haking, Hunter-Weston, French, Gough, Mahon, Stopford (cont. page 94). So: generally a good read but sometimes a bit short on detail.

Impressive epic of a book. It covers a lot but remains entertaining. I do think there’s more value in reading more specific histories - it’s impossible to get a real (non-superficial) understanding otherwise.

Eg one of my favourite bits was how the House of Commons came to be built: English law was a medieval concept. Classical architecture was seen as top down and ‘rules based’, gothic seen as bottom up and a ‘community of craft’. Therefore when parliament was burnt down in 1834 and needed rebuilding, this style appealed as a way of making politicians accountable to the people. It was seen as a way to ensure a spirit of justice, freedom and virtue. Sir Charles Barry designed it a part of a public competition.

I only got half through, Queen Victoria's death, before it expired but what I heard I liked.

Vol. 1 - quite dull. Learned that the Brits loved to slaughter each other.
Vol. 2 - getting better. Found out how tough it is to create a democracy.
Vol. 3 - This is Schamas at his best. Finally he is writing with aplomb, and I appreciate how he tries to make women a central part of the story as much as possible - given that usually history is written from the perspective of the male!

Simon Schama is a rebel par excellence. His disclaimer in the beginning of the book best sums up the quirkiness of the ride that readers should expect to take. He warns that his audience should not expect odes to Sir Robert Peel, the great Parliamentarian who came to define liberal politics or Reginald Maudling a towering figure in the Post War Britain. Schama is a hipster-historian. He finds Thomas Bewick, a natural history author, a romantic, and an engraver a better representative to some important trends in Britain's late years of the 18th Century. He is obsessed with poets and writers. For a study of Chartism, he looks at Elizabeth Gaskell and for Victorian Morality at Thomas Carlyle while with a sleeve picking up the affinity to Great Heroes. While the ruffian scorns at academia for discarding Great Men, Schama precisely revives them. Lovers of biographies should rejoice to the details that Schama is willing to disclose on the lives of William Hazlitt, Trevelyan, Churchill, and George Orwell. A non-British who deserves an honorary mention in this list is Rousseau a true maker of the modern world. Economic history seems to limp somewhere in the background while cultural history revels under the spotlight. This book is an enjoyable ride because of how intimate Schama is with it.This is not the history of Britain but 'his' history of Britain. Schama hides no facts about the brutal involvement of Britain in Ireland and India and all the forces that exacerbated it and stayed silent. But rising above all stories and heroes, stands high the historian and how he came to master his material. He seems to a lover of history like me - omniscient.

very joyful read

This book is the third in a three book series which traces what happened to the Britain, the British, and the subsequent British Empire since history was first recorded.

My grumble about the 2 previous books in the series were a bit... brief and breezy, which is something that the author acknowledges for this book, which covers the period between the time we lost the American Colonies to the year 2000.

It wasn't a bad book, but it's strange, a lot of the empire was built post 1776 (which surprised me, I just assumed it had been about longer, which it wasn't with the exception of the Americas, West Indies, and our slave related issues in Africa). So this book covers the entirety of what most British people might call "Modern Britain", and even then, it's all build up and no action. The eventual reversion back to a small country was only pretty briefly covered (in his introduction, Schama said he felt weird writing about his life as history).

The other thing that surprised me was how much of the book seemed to imply that the English thought of Wales, Scotland and Ireland as the basis of empire, rather than being equal partners, or regions of a greater entity, which is something I'd not thought of before reading this book.

All in all, it's a good read, I just suspect it could have been better if it had been split in two books as long as this book.