Ronald Hyam

When I went up to Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1960, freshmen (we were all men) were presented with a potted history of the place written almost forty years earlier by its then master, Arthur Christopher Benson. The slim volume was remarkable for its smugness and snobbery, which confirmed the common opinion that Magdalene was a finishing school for Old Etonians.

Before we look at your five book choices, for the uninitiated, can you describe when the British Empire was at its height and what it encompassed? There are various different ways of describing the Empire at its height, but if you want to know at what point the largest amount of the globe was coloured red, then it is just after the end of the First World War. But the Empire actually started with British exploration of the eastern seaboard of the United States, back in the 17th century.