This Sceptred Isle

This Sceptred Isle was created as a series of short 12-14 minute radio programmes by the BBC for transmission daily on Radio 4 from 1996 about the history of the lands and peoples of the British Isles.

Starting in 55 BC with the arrival of Julius Caesar and initially concluding in 1901 with the death of Queen Victoria, the series was read by Anna Massey and included extracts from the book A history of the English-speaking Peoples written by Sir Winston Churchill, interwoven into Christopher Lee's main account of the history. The extracts were read by Paul Eddington and Peter Jeffrey. In total the series contained 216 episodes, ran 29 hours, and was first broadcast in daily episodes between June 1995 and June 1996.

The series was very successful, being broadcast twice each day in the morning and late at night, and in 1999 the BBC extended the programme to cover the Twentieth Century; picking up from where the first series had finished to the end of the millennium. This new series was a total of 15.25 hours long and although used the same narrator the quotations were read by Robert Powell. The first episode of this new series was broadcast on August 30 1999 and the final episode on December 31 1999.