Once vast swathes of the globe were coloured imperial red and Britannia ruled not just the waves, but the prairies of America, the jungles of Africa and the deserts of Arabia. Just how did a small, rainy island in the North Atlantic achieve all this? And why did the empire on which the sun literally never set finally declined and fall? Niall Ferguson's acclaimed "Empire" brilliantly unfolds the imperial story in all its splendour and its miseries, showing how a gang of buccaneers and gold-diggers planted the seed of the biggest empire in all history - and set the world on the road to modernity.