Brilliantly told, mixing facts with eye-witness accounts, mixing narration with actors portraying individuals of the time makes for a very easy-listening experience while geting across a huge amount of facts and figures too. It's actually a very exciting story full of fascinating and sometimes completely crazy people in extraordinary and occasionally hair-raising situations. What a remarkable period of our history. Importantly it is, at least as far as I can see, very even-handed in its explanations of events, not jingoistic but not too PC either. The only thing better than this as an introduction to the British Empire at its height might possibly be George Macdonald Fraser's brilliant Flashman novels.