The Best Episodes Written By Simon Schama

Nations is the epic account of how the nations of Britain emerged from under the hammer of England's "Longshanks" King Edward I, with a sense of who and what they were, which endures to this day.

It took only six years for the plague to ravage the British Isles. Its impact was to last for generations. But from the ashes of this trauma an unexpected and unique class of Englishman emerged.

Here Simon Schama charts the upheaval caused as a country renowned for its piety, whose king styled himself Defender of the Faith, turns into one of the most aggressive proponents of the new Protestant faith.

This is the story of two queens - Elizabeth I the consummate politician and Mary Queen of Scots the Catholic mother. It is also the story of the birth of a nation.

Simon Schama starts his story in the Stone Age village of Skara Brae, Orkney. Over the next four thousand years Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Christian missionaries arrive, fight, settle and leave their mark on what will become the nations of Britain.

1066 is not the best remembered date in British history for nothing. In the space of nine hours whilst the Battle of Hastings raged, everything changed. Anglo-Saxon England became Norman and, for the next 300 years, its fate was decided by dynasties of French rulers.

There is no saga more powerful than that of the warring dynasty - domineering father, beautiful, scheming mother and squabbling, murderous sons and daughters, (particularly the nieces). In the years that followed the Norman Conquest, this was the drama played out on the stage of British history.

In the aftermath of Civil War, Britain was a kingless republic led by Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell ruled with an iron hand; when Parliament dared defy him, he marched in and closed it down. He ruled as king in all but name, with his Major Generals imposing Godly Puritan rule on the counties. The anarchy that prevailed at his death led to the Restoration of Charles II, who survived the Great Fire and a dynastic crisis triggered by anti-Catholic paranoia. James II's Catholic fervour threatened to trigger another revolution; he was deposed by the troops of the Dutch King William.

How did a people who thought themselves free end up subjugating so much of the world, a nation with such a distrust of armies become the greatest military power on Earth, an empire of the free become an empire of slaves?Britons took the flag across the globe and created an empire built on ambition and slavery, exploration and daring. Trade flourished in the addictive commodities of tea, sugar and coffee, as did the deplorable trade in people. Taxation lost Britain the American colonies, but paved the way for dominance in India, as tax gatherers became administrators and merchants, emperors. The Wrong Empire is the exhilarating and terrible story of how one small group of islands came to dominate the world; a story of exploration and daring, but also one of exploitation and conflict.

The turbulent civil wars of the early seventeenth century would culminate in two events unique to British history; the public execution of a king and the creation of a republic. Schama tells of the brutal war that tore the country in half and created a new Britain - divided by politics and religion and dominated by the first truly modern army, fighting for ideology, not individual leaders.

In 1690s England, the victors of the Glorious Revolution celebrated the dawn of a new era under a new king - William III. In Scotland, the Jacobites still supported the deposed King James II and the country suffered crippling poverty and famine.Relations between Scotland and England were tainted by the Glencoe Massacre in 1692 and Westminster's strategy to scupper the Darien venture. Half a century later, however, the two countries were forging a partnership, based on profit and interest, which evolved into the Act of Union in 1707.

Examine the formative role of art and the creative imagination in the forging of humanity itself. Images and artifacts found in Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia and South America testify to the urge to develop civilizations. Liev Schreiber narrates.