Bringing his six-volume History of England to a triumphant close, Peter Ackroyd offers a sweeping narrative spanning from the end of the Boer War and the accession of Edward VII to the end of the 20th century, when the late Elizabeth II had been on the throne for almost five decades. It was a century of enormous change, encompassing two world wars, four monarchs, the decline of the aristocracy, and the rise of the Labour Party. As Ackroyd recounts in this tour de force, it was a period that encompassed the Bloomsbury Group and the Sex Pistols, T.S. Eliot and Philip Larkin, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.