Lately, Britain's globe-trotting, crowd-pleasing telechefs have been losing air time (and book sales) to a new breed of celebrity: the telehistorian, serving up entertaining, easy-to-digest lessons about the past. In rapid succession, Simon Schama's blockbuster
A History of Britain
has been followed by Adam Hart-Davis'
What the Tudors and Stuarts Did for Us
and David Starkey's Six Wives:
The Queens of Henry VIII
Now, with the timing of a busy sous chef, Niall Ferguson, Professor of Political and Financial History at Oxford University, launches
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
(Allen Lane; 392 pages) upon a nation again being...
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