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Before fate intervened, Joseph Needham was a distinguished biochemist at Cambridge University, married to a fellow scientist. In 1937 he was asked to supervise a young Chinese student named Lu Gwei-Djen, and in that moment began the two greatest love affairs of his life - Miss Lu, and China. Miss Lu inspired Needham to travel to China where he initially spent three dangerous years as a wartime diplomat. By the end of his life, Needham had become the pre-eminent China scholar of all time, a truly global figure, travelling endlessly and honoured by all. And in 1989, after a 52 year affair, he finally married the woman who had first inspired his passion.

The most terrifying and destructive volcanic cataclysm in modern recorded history took place in August 1883, when a series of incredibly powerful detonations destroyed the landmark island of Krakatoa, five miles off the western tip of Java. The impact of the explosions was utterly destructive in the immediate region, destroying 200 villages and 40,000 people. The explosions had a dramatic effect that was felt and heard for thousands of miles, over fully ten per cent of the earth's surface, in central Australia, in East Africa, in India and in China. Ships sailing as far away as the Red Sea were covered with thick volcanic ash and immense rafts of pumice, some big enough to support trees and animals, floated in the seas clear across to Africa. Even more amazingly, the explosions were experienced around the whole world - by way of a substantial ten year burst of global warming - by the brilliance of sunsets and by the presence of fine suspended ash in the air. Using contemporaneous reports, this book recounts the events that led up to the cataclysm, as well as those occurring immediately after. Above all, Simon Winchester writes about how the Americans, English, Chinese and Dutch - and also the Javanese and Sumatrans to whom this land belonged - dealt with the unforgettable events of the day that their world exploded.

In 1985 Simon Winchester was struck with the idea of visiting the assorted far-flung islands which are all that remain of the British Empire. He travelled 100,000 miles back and forth, from Antartica to the Carribbean, from the Mediterranean to the Far East in his search to discover what had once made Britain Great.