Compelling… we remain in a state of suspense throughout

Extraordinary… superb… It is a book for serious people who can handle difficult moral contradictions, and will undoubtedly annoy zealots of all stripes

Excellent… his mastery of detail is impeccable

A refreshingly nuanced montage of the Empire on its last legs… Empire was many things and Parker belongs to that vanishing minority that recognises this. What we have here is a fair appraisal of the life of the land, elegantly synthesised… By 1923, Parker shows with suggestive brilliance in his montage, Empire was on its last legs

Marvellous… escapes the inane, balance-sheet view of Empire and sees it in its full complexity

Breathtaking, extraordinarily rich and beautifully written. One Fine Day is a vital and important history that is truly global in scope and ambition. A wonderful read

An engrossing and wide-ranging account of the zenith of the British Empire – with all the contradictions, brittleness, ambition and hubris that moment entailed. Across Continents and characters, Matthew Parker provides a new, global history of British imperialism which feels both epic and immediate.

Extraordinary. Matthew Parker’s magisterial sweep through one day of British imperial history and culture plunges us into the global complexity of the British Empire, bringing the world of a century ago to fresh, vivid life. An astonishing achievement.

An epic portrait of the British Empire on the brink… Parker paints a brilliant picture, teeming with fresh faces and new voices

There is something Shakespearian about Matthew Parker’s insightful argument that it was at exactly the time that the British Empire reached its greatest territorial size that the factors coalesced which were to destroy it… Parker has rendered a signal service by convincingly pinpointing the exact fulcrum moment in its half-millennium long history

Exquisitely crafted and beautifully written, full of delicious detail and extraordinary insight

A panoramic view of the British Empire on September 29, 1923… Parker vividly demonstrates the empire’s vast reach and the ‘impossibly conflicting interests between government [and] the governed’ … Accessible and sturdy, this expansive account provides solid ground for understanding the decline of the British Empire. It’s an eye-opening and a unique vantage point from which to study 20th-century history

An ambitious history of the beginning of the end of vast dominions of the British Empire on Sept. 29, 1923… a multilayered portrait, with deep contextual background… An impressive work of research and synthesis tracing the end of an empire

Epic in scale yet intimate in detail… a vast historical canvas on which each individual brushstroke had been brought vividly to life. A narrative triumph

An engrossing read sprung from an impressive archival sweep… Parker tells the unwieldy story of empire through a microcosm, and in so doing captures it in all its chaotic contradictions… An impressive feat that few historians are capable of

A picture of an empire straining under the weight of its own contradictions… Mr Parker points this out with copious examples and meticulous research

One Fine Day takes an engrossing trip round [the British Empire] at the very moment, almost exactly 100 years ago, when it reached its greatest extent

A clever concept that works extraordinarily well… Exhaustively researched and sensitively written, One Fine Day is a superbly nuanced snapshot of the British Empire at its apogee