One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink. By Matthew Parker. PublicAffairs; 624 pages; $35. Abacus; £25 Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain. By Charlotte Lydia Riley. Bodley Head ...

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, an author and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Raised in London, Bergen has a ...

Only a very confident historian with a massive, comprehensive, and thoroughly researched manuscript would willingly invite comparisons with the British historian Edward Gibbon. Brendon, a Cambridge ...

States are often prisoners of their pasts. History shapes how they interact and compete in the international arena. In the United Kingdom, where enthusiasm abounds after Keir Starmer’s Labour Party ...

For many residents of the United Kingdom, the death of Queen Elizabeth II has prompted questions about how the country is transitioning—substantively and symbolically—into a new era. Elizabeth ...

The nineteenth-century historian Sir John Seeley famously remarked that the British "conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind." Seeley was right that the United Kingdom's ...