No empire has been larger or more diverse than the British Empire. At its apogee in the 1930s, 42 million Britons governed 500 million foreign subjects. Britannia ruled the waves & a quarter of the earth`s surface was painted red on the map. Yet no empire (except the Russian) disappeared more swiftly. Within a generation this mighty structure collapsed, often amid bloodshed, leaving behind a scatter of sea-girt dependencies & a ghost of an empire, the Commonwealth, overshadowed by Imperial America. It left a contested legacy: at best a sporting spirit, a legal code & a near-universal language; at worst, failed states & internecine strife. Full of vivid particulars, brief lives, telling anecdotes, comic episodes, symbolic moments & illustrative vignettes, The Decline & Fall of the British Empire is popular history at its scholarly best.