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‘I Found It Easy to Pray at St George’s, Feeling the Weight of the Millions of Prayers That Must Have Been Dispatched to God’
Empire States
In 1588, the year of the Armada, Philip II of Spain was the most powerful monarch in the world. Forty years later, Spain went bust with the English and the Dutch squabbling over the carcass of the first global superpower. The British Empire reached its greatest territorial extent in 1922. A quarter of a century later, Britain was bankrupt.
In the aftermath of 9/11, a rich businessman bought me dinner. “There are no rivals,” he remarked. “What can challenge the power of the United States?” We scratched our heads. The 21st Century, we concluded, would belong to America.
