Available in May 2021: (Order your copy now - click here)

Financial Times of London: "Linda Colley’s historical expeditions are often inspiring. Once captured, the prisms through which you see characters, events and sites are twisted this way and that, revealing new, deeper ways of understanding.

With Britons: Forging the Nation (1992) she illuminated how the 1707 British union of England, Wales and Scotland developed loyalty through shared Protestantism, hostility for and from the mostly Catholic European powers, and empire. Today, Scots nationalists see the decay of these three as proof that the Union lacks a fixative and now test that thesis to destruction — perhaps even of the UK itself. A decade later, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World (2002) explored the British as “uniquely ubiquitous invaders and sometimes desperately vulnerable”.

Her latest book, The Gun, the Ship and the Pen, on the making of constitutions, differs in being global in reach — though constitutional issues are now high on the political agenda in a UK confronting the rise in Scottish nationalism and the consequences of Brexit. Colley’s story is the shaping of the modern world as told through the documents that seek to encapsulate a common purpose and define, or redefine, power and the rights and responsibilities of states and citizens."