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Acclaimed author Peter Conrad explains how the United States established a new global order through the export of its art, its jeans and jazz, its fast food and fridges, its technologies and therapies and its cinema. Conrad says that despite resistance from some quarters to processed cheese and Coca-Cola, the world was eager to embrace the gloss and glamour of the United States and its consumer goods. Conrad assesses what the world has lost and gained by this Americanization.

Conrad is a former lecturer in English literature at the University of Oxford. He has written more than 20 acclaimed books across a wide range of subjects including studies of Hitchcock and Orson Welles; Modern Times, Modern Places; A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of Opera; Imagining America; and The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York.

Here he talks to FT arts editor Peter Aspden.

Supported by Ian and Carol Sellars.