A small island in the North Atlantic, colonized by Rome, then pillaged for hundreds of years by marauding neighbours, becomes the dominant world power in the nineteenth century. As its power spreads, its language inevitably follows. Then, across the Atlantic, a colony of that tiny island grows into the military and cultural colossus of the twentieth century. These centuries of empire-building and war, international trade and industrial ingenuity, will bring to the world great works of literature and extraordinary movies, cricket pitches and episodes of Dallas, the printing press and the internet. But then what? As Robert McCrum demonstrates in his provocative new book, what happens next is quite unprecedented. While the global dominance of Anglo-American power appears to be on the wane, the English language has acquired an astonishing new life of its own. With a supranational momentum, it is now able to zoom across time and space at previously unimaginable speeds. In McCrum's...