God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World
By Walter Russell Mead
Atlantic £25, 320 pages
FT bookshop price: £20

It was the arch Anglo-American Winston Churchill who gave the phrase “English-speaking peoples’’ currency, as shorthand for the inhabitants of Great Britain and the US, not forgetting Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Last year, the British historian Andrew Roberts sought to revive it by adding a 20th-century volume to Churchill’s four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Now comes the American Walter Russell Mead. His contention is that people such as himself – here usually referred to as “the Anglo-Americans’’ – “made the modern world’’.