The truth of the cliché, variously attributed to George Bernard Shaw or to Winston Churchill, that the Americans and the British are “two peoples divided by a common language” becomes more apparent with every year that passes. The “special relationship” survives, despite the nay-sayers, but in diminishing form; and the common language, although still reflecting a shared value system and in some respects a common culture, disguises what I sense to be the fact that the Americans and the British, always indefinably “foreign” to one another, are becoming more so. In An Empire on the Edge, Nick Bunker looks in detail at the first major stage in this process of mutual alienation, examining the nexus of developments that culminated in the celebrated Bos