A light-hearted toast to what really made Britain Great

Nujeen Mustafa, a Kurd, was born with cerebral palsy and cannot walk. Because she lived in a fifthfloor flat in Aleppo she was unable to go to school, but educated herself, learning fluent English from television. When the civil war broke out, she and her family fled first to Turkey, then across the Mediterranean to Greece and finally Germany. She describes how, in 2015, she was one of 1.2 million refugees who reached Europe. She hates the word “refugee” more than any word in English: “What it really means is a second-class citizen with a number... who everyone wishes would somehow go away. The year 2015 was when I became a fact, a statistic, a number .... (But) we are not numbers, we are human beings and we all have stories.” Co-author Christina Lamb is veteran British foreign correspondent and author of books including The Africa House and The Sewing Circles of Herat. AS IT happens, on the morning I begin writing this review, I am feeling a little fuzzy around the edges. If this is the

I fear that, last night I might have been well and truly conquered.

Henry Jeffreys’s first book, though, has an interesting premise: that of all the countries that might lay claim to having the greatest influence on alcoholic refreshment, it’s probably Britain that shades it.

Take champagne. The technology for making sparkling wine came from England. So did the taste for bone-dry wines. If it hadn’t been for us, champagne would have been flat and sweet.

Furthermore, take port. Look at the names on the bottles. Taylor’s, Churchill’s, Cockburn’s. Nothing terribly Portuguese about any of those. Or claret, which may or may not have been the drink that caused last night’s revelries.

Bordeaux as a wine region was founded under English rule, and its modern wines were sold by British wine merchants. It’s the salesmanship that counts.

Wines from Bordeaux and Champagne would probably have been excellent anyway. But where the Brits came in was to take a local product and sell it all around the world. According to Jeffreys, almost all the world’s classic drinks came to prominence this way.

Gin, whisky, rum, madeira, sherry: you name it, we drank it first. As a result, most of these drinks were formulated to our specific tastes. Our apparently insatiable thirst truly created an empire