This Sceptred Isle: The Making of the British

The award-winning story of Britain, from the arrival of Julius Caesar in 55BC to the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. 'Wonderful...This Sceptred Isle has provided one of the greatest treats for listeners in recent years.' Paul Donovan, Sunday Times.

The story of Victoria's long reign is a saga worthy of one of the nineteenth century's own great novelists. In 1837, the new seventeen year old Queen could never have guessed all that was to come in the remainder of the century. It was an age of huge and lasting social changes: the age of Palmerston, Gladstone, and Disraeli; of Dickens, Thackeray, Macaulay, Trollope, Browning, Tennyson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Gilbert and Sullivan, Oscar Wilde; of Florence Nightengale, the first bicycle and the first electric light bulb, the Salvation Army, the first Dr Barnardo's home and the American Civil War.

By the end of her long life, Victoria was a witness tot he shift in world power and the stage was set for a new century of unimaginable turmoil. But her own presence had been so dominant that the age which ended with her death would forever be remembered by her.