Volume III takes us from the mid-1770s when the country was intoxicated by a great surge of political energy in the form of Romanticism. From there, Simon Schama takes the reader through the massive advances of technology and industrialisation during the Victorian era, and the burgeoning of the British Empire, and he concludes by examining the overwhelming presence of the past in the 20th- Century Britain through the lives of Churchill and Orwell. Walking through the pages of A History of Britain is a succession of big and bold characters that illuminate these historical themes. Wordsworth, Burke, Queen Victoria are all here. But also the less known lives such as Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman doctor, 'Mother' Mary Seacole, the forgotten Caribbean nurse and heroine of the Crimea War, and Dadabhai Naoroji, who, in c.1890, became the first Asian MP.