One Fine Day

29th September 1923. The British Empire was 14 million square miles, just under a quarter of the globe's land area, and 460 million people, a fifth of the world's population. In One Fine Day Matthew Parker takes a snapshot of this astonishing edifice in all its glory but with all of its ugly underbelly clearly visible, and with the seeds of its demise already evident. Readers will be able to inhabit the lives of people, rich and poor, male and female, coloniser and colonised, who are agents in this moment of apparent imperial super-glory. We learn what they ate, what they wore, their likes and dislikes, what they thought. This magisterial survey takes in in trivial, personal events as well as momentous political and military ones. While there might be ground-breaking elections, military clashes and violent demonstrations, there are also marriages, suicides, strange disappearances, parties. This, then, will be the story of the greatest empire in world history at its absolute, hubristic zenith.