There is a tradition of biographical storytelling in historiography that goes back through Lytton Strachey, John Aubrey and Gaius Suetonius to Plutarch. Jonathan Morgan's book is in that tradition.

He has described a set of politicians from Wales or with Welsh ancestry who have had a very wide range of impacts on history and who date from the sixteenth century to today.

It is often perceived in the world of States that if a small country is positioned next to a large and powerful country, it and its citizens could get an inferiority complex. Wales' contribution to the United Kingdom in terms of power, politics and participation has been so significant as this book shows, that there should be no inferiority complex.