In this remarkable collection of nine astute and superbly entertaining essays, historian David Cannadine offers his own observations about what makes the British aristocracy so powerful, vulnerable, quixotic, and endlessly fascinating. Starting with the birth of the British upper-class in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the essays provide a significant and provocative assessment of the roles these dynastic families played in the evolution of Britain's financial, geographic, and industrial history. Along the way, Cannadine critically dissects and rehabilitates the lives of Winston Churchill, Harold Nicolson, and Vita Sackville-West. Cannadine's uniquely informed perspective brings a mixture of sympathy and detachment, skeptical interest, and ironic fascination to the continuing drama of the aristocracy in modern history.