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If in his previous books Tim Marshall was able to explain world politics and describe the local and global crises of our time through geography, in his new, equally engaging book he allows the reader to gain insight into history as well as to understand the challenges of today's complicated world through the seemingly peripheral phenomenon of flags. Flags have accompanied us for thousands of years as powerful symbols of our pride, our hopes and our dreams. We wave them, we burn them, we march under their colours and, even in the 21st century, we die for them, but we also kill in their name. The reader will be surprised at all that can be gleaned from the flags, their history and, above all, the disputes and struggles over these national symbols, and what these emotionally charged coloured 'pieces of cloth' say about everything.

Divided into nine chapters on the United States, Great Britain, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America, international flags and "flags of terror", the book does not, however, deal only with "big" global issues, that have moved and continue to move the world, such as ethnic and religious identity, nationalism, Islamism, inter-ethnic rivalries, and the civil strife and conflicts that can be observed in many parts of the world. The author also introduces the reader to many little-known facts related to the history of flags: We learn, for example, that if the American flag is too worn out, there are precise rules and rituals for giving it a proper burial; that the number of stars on the blue background of the European Union flag is the result of chance (and perhaps a touch of Italian superstition); that Mahatma Gandhi himself played a major role in the development of the Indian flag, while the Nigerian flag was based on a drawing by a 20-year-old student who responded to a newspaper advertisement inviting entries for a competition to design the best flag for the new sovereign state...

In his book, Tim Marshall connects ancient history with contemporary events, great themes with "anecdotal" stories from history, and shows what that "piece of cloth" tied to the flagpole can mean and why we need to know old and new flags if we want to better understand what is happening in the world today.

Czech edition