Change - sometimes gentle and subtle, sometimes shocking and violent - is the dynamic of Simon Schama's unapologetically personal and grippingly written history of Britain, especially the changes that wash over custom and habit, transforming our loyalties.

What makes or breaks a nation? To whom do we give our allegiance and why? And where do the boundaries of our community lie - in our hearth and home, our village or city, tribe or faith? What is Britain - one country or many? Has British history unfolded 'at the edge of the world' or right at the heart of it?

Schama delivers these themes in a form that is at once traditional and excitingly fresh. The great and the wicked are here - Becket and Thomas Cromwell, Robert the Bruce and Anne Boleyn - but so are countless more ordinary lives: an Irish monk waiting for the plague to kill him in his cell at Kilkenny; a small boy running through the streets of London to catch a glimpse of Elizabeth I.

The first in a series, this volume paints a rich and vivid portrait of the life of the British people and their nation.

Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University. His award-winning books, translated into fifteen languages, includeCitizens,Landscape and Memory, Rembrandt's Eyes,A History of Britain,The Power of Art,Rough Crossings,The American Future, The Face of BritainandThe Story of the Jews: Finding the Words (1000 BCE - 1492).

His art columns for theNew Yorkerwon the National Magazine Award for criticism and his journalism has appeared regularly in theGuardianand theFinancial Timeswhere he is Contributing Editor. He has written and presented forty films for BBC2 on subjects as diverse as Tolstoy, American politics and John Donne.