Change - sometimes gentle and subtle sometimes shocking and violent - is the dynamic of Schama's unapologetically personal history, especially the changes that wash over custom and habit, transforming our loyalties. At the heart of his history lie questions of compelling importance for our future as well as our past: what makes or breaks a nation - to whom do we give our allegiance and why? And where do the boundaries of our community lie - in our hearth and home, our village or city, tribe or faith? What is Britain, one country or many, one culture or several? Has British history unfolded "at the edge of the world" or right at the heart of it? All these themes are delivered to the reader in the stories which Schama tells. The great and wicked are all here - Becket and Thomas Cromwell, Robert the Bruce and Ann Boleyn, but so are countless more ordinary lives - an Irish monk waiting for the plague to kill him in his cell at Kilkenny; a small boy running through the streets of London to catch a glimpse of Elizabeth I.