Andrew Marr traces Britain's transformation from the end of Victoria's reign to the fall of Dunkirk across six episodes, using archive footage and firsthand accounts to track a nation through crisis after crisis. He opens with a country mourning its queen while fighting the Boers in South Africa, entertaining itself at the music hall, and worrying about the fitness of its working class, then follows the political feud between David Lloyd George and Joseph Chamberlain and the day Charles Rolls met Henry Royce. Suffragettes, Irish home rule, and labor strikes crowd the years before 1914, and Marr argues the Great War reshaped Britain at the front and at home in ways that never fully reversed. The series carries on through the experimental 1920s, the Wall Street crash, mass unemployment, and the rise of homegrown paramilitary groups like the Greenshirts, before closing on the Second World War and the evacuation that became, in Marr's telling, the moment the country defined itself.