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When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires.

Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.

You know, the Brits had a way of - running an empire. And I don't think America is comfortable with an empire.

All empires come to an end, and the American one is no exception.

The London I entered was a great bustling metropolitan city at war, an imperial power fighting to hold on to that empire. And the teeming colonial subjects of that empire did not, on the whole, want England to lose that war, but they also did not want the empire to emerge unchanged from it. This, for very many of us, was the hard dilemma.

The American empire will not disappear... because America does not have an empire.

Teaching the history of the British Empire links in with that of the world: for better and for worse, the Empire made us what we are, forming our national identity. A country that does not understand its own history is unlikely to respect that of others.

Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go.

Were you to read the British press today, you would learn that the British Empire never forgets its defeats.

When I was young and the empire was beginning to disintegrate, the idea was absolutely unbelievable, particularly to children who'd been taught that the sun never set... that's what all my books are about, the end of empire.