Speaker 1: 0:15

Hi, this is Omid Ashtari and Natasha McElhone. In this episode we talk to Ben McIntyre. He is a columnist and associate editor on the Times. Ben McIntyre. He is a columnist and associate editor on the Times. He's also an award-winning author and one of the most acclaimed writers of espionage history.

Speaker 2: 0:30

His books Agent Zigzag, a Spy Among Friends, the Spy and the Traitor, agent Sonia Lover, mother Soldier, spy, operation Mincemeat, double Cross and SAS Rogue Heroes have reached bestseller status and many have been adapted for the screen.

Speaker 1: 0:48

Ben's latest book Kolditz Prisoners of the Castle, tells the astonishing true story of history's most infamous prison and became the biggest selling history book of 2022 and a number one Sunday Times bestseller. His upcoming book, the Siege, is about the greatest SAS hostage drama held in the Iranian embassy in London in 1980.

Speaker 2: 1:11

We will talk about the ultimate history curriculum.

Speaker 1: 1:15

How reality is always stranger than fiction. Historical quantum leaps Agent versus structure theory.

Speaker 2: 1:22

Uncovering the hidden story of spies.

Speaker 1: 1:25

How much of history is the story of the victors?

Speaker 2: 1:29

How much virality could change the way we tell history in the future.

Speaker 1: 1:33

Okay, let's travel back through time.

Speaker 2: 1:40

Hi, this is Omid Ashnari.

Speaker 1: 1:42

And Natasha McElhone and with us today. We have Me.

Speaker 3: 1:48

Ben McIntyre. Hi Ben, how are you? Hello?

Speaker 2: 1:50

both. I'm very well. Good Thanks for taking the time. We wanted to talk to you about history today, which is implicitly very much part of everything you do. If you had a magic wand and you could give everyone in the UK a basic curriculum of history, what would that curriculum look like? What would have to be part of that?

Speaker 3: 2:15

Well, obviously, I would insist that they study exclusively the Second World War and, within that, espionage. I mean, that's the only thing you really need to know? I'm being completely facetious, of course. Yeah, I don't know. There are two schools aren't mean that's the only thing you really need to know? Of course, I'm being completely facetious, of course. Yeah, I don't know. There are two schools, aren't there? There's the view that my dad was an academic at Oxford, so he was of the view that in order to know history, you really had to know the whole of history.

Speaker 3: 2:38

So, from the beginning to the end. So you had to have a kind of bit of everything. Um, I went to cambridge and the view there was different was that you specialize, you would pick off very early on, you took a deep mine into certain areas and I guess that's been very much. My approach is I you can ask me anything about medieval history and I won't have a clue. But so I loved the way that, particularly when I was studying it, you could pick all sorts of mad things you could could do Mau Mau history or Byzantine history or the history of political thought, and it didn't all have to join up.

Speaker 3: 3:12

And I think that's in a way the curriculum today does. That it is. You know, the choices you make for GCSE are very different. I mean, you can, you know, my children have all done history and they've all done completely different things. So I think I'm rather in favour of that. So I'm not sure I would say that there are sort of essential things that you have to know, so long as what you do study in history is sufficiently deep and broad that you actually really tackle the subject. I mean, I think the broader the brush, in a way, the more it becomes a story, particularly if you're learning in your teens of sort of dates and places and events. I don't think that kind of history is terribly interesting.

Speaker 1: 3:51

That was going to be my next question to you was do you think we focus too much upon facts, dates, times, names rather than trends, cycles and dynamics? I do rather than trends, cycles and dynamics.

Speaker 3: 4:04

I do. I think that although I think that is waning the kind of one thing happened and then another thing happened. School of history I mean that was when I was at school. It really was sort of rote learning of dates and events and sequences but also a certain amount of sort of movements and so on. I'm an advocate of sort of a slightly different approach really, which is that I think history is really all about personality and character and what ordinary people do in extraordinary circumstances.

Speaker 3: 4:33

I'm less interested in the waves of history as certain people see them, a kind of Marxian view that there are inevitable flows of history, that if certain things happen, certain other things will happen. There's an inevitability to the way history unfolds. I don't think that's true. I've never thought that was true. I mean, whether you take a Marxist view or a Manichaean view or whatever, it doesn't. But history isn't like that.

Speaker 3: 4:57

History is completely unpredictable but at the same time it does have its internal patterns. But those are much more, I think, related to character and personality and moment and fate and accident and boredom and all the things that you don't really study in history but are nonetheless very important. So I don't think I would have a prescriptive view of what ought to be on a curriculum, except that what you do shouldn't simply be a study of sort of sequential events. You need the structure, you need to know the order of things that happen. But actually within that and actually GCSE and A-level history at the moment are quite good at this I mean they do encourage you very much to look at what the sort of texts of the time say about what you know about it. So you're very often presented, I mean, with a text you've probably never seen before, but nonetheless you have to sort of relate to a kind of broader story and I think that's great. I mean I love doing the GCSE sort of give me a bit of Weimar history, I can wade my way through that.

Speaker 1: 6:01

I know you're going to ask a question.

Speaker 2: 6:04

That's fine, wade my way through that.

Speaker 1: 6:05

I know you're going to ask a question Do you think, in our current news cycle and overabundance of the present, all of those things that we're wrestling with at the moment, that facts and dates and times are actually quite anchoring and we should know more about those, rather than personality being dominant and trumping?

Speaker 3: 6:25

Well, I don't know.

Speaker 3: 6:26

I mean, trumping is a loaded word, I mean I think the truth is in an age of sort of fake news it's very important to realise that there are truths in history as there are truths in the modern world as well, and that certain things are undeniably the case. Almost every sort of populist movement at the moment takes history and bends it towards what suits their narrative. I mean it's, you know, it's particularly egregious in the Soviet Union. What I meant was Putin's Russia, that his absolute willingness to sort of turn Ukrainian history on its head and tell a completely different narrative is just the most extreme example of what a lot of populist movements do. Trump is another one. So, yeah, I think we have to realise that there are certain incontrovertible events in history that you shouldn't be mucking around with. But within that, I think there's great scope for sort of exploring how people behave in unlikely circumstances. That's the stuff that interests me.

Speaker 3: 7:35

I don't really believe in sort of good and bad history. The danger at the moment, it seems to me, is that we tend to look back at history as if it was some form of moral accountancy, that we're there to pass judgment on the past and that somehow, by imposing our modern mores on what has happened in the past, we will feel better about ourselves and we will bring to account the past. Now that seems to me to be a sort of pointless exercise. I can't think why anyone would want to do that, because you can only understand history when you understand the context of what people were doing. So absolutely, let us condemn slavery, because there were people at the time saying this is disgraceful, this is contemptible, this should not be, should not be happening right from the beginning. So we need to hear those voices, we need to hear those experiences.

Speaker 3: 8:30

But but to sort of see it as, somehow, as history is black and white, that there are goodies and baddies, heroes and villains, and usually in that sort of narrative, the goodies triumph from the baddies because, you know, the victors write the history and that somehow that, therefore, you know it all works out well in the end. Well, that's complete nonsense, isn't it? Because history isn't black and white. It's a wonderful set of greys where often people do what we would now see as the wrong thing, but for the right reasons. They're as confused as we are. I mean, people have no idea in the time why they're behaving the way they are, or they think they do, but they frequently don't.

Speaker 2: 9:06

Well, we don't either, right.

Speaker 3: 9:07

And we may think we're acting from one motive, whereas actually, you know, if you dig a bit deeper, the psychological aspect of history is fascinating. People seldom behave in the ways they do for the reasons that they think they're doing it. If you see what I mean.

Speaker 3: 9:20

So I think all of that is absolutely fascinating and much more complicated, in a way, than the history I grew up with, which was about. You know. Economic movements produced this. Ideological movements produced that People were somehow in a way born along by the tides of history, whereas actually I think that's not quite true. I think people frequently look at their context of their worlds and behave in different ways. So I'm not a fan of the kind of let's look back at history and expose the bad people, tear down the statues, rip it all up and start again and impose what we think is right and wrong on the past. That's a pointless exercise, it seems to me. Yes, let's look at Cecil Rhodes. Let's really explore what that was about and why he was an important figure and why he mattered, and which bits of his world were under sharp criticism at the time and which were not. Which bits do we condemn in the light of what was happening then, not in the way we feel now, and which do we say, okay, that was part of the way people thought back?

Speaker 2: 10:29

then, of course, that exercise can be done by people 200 years from now with us.

Speaker 3: 10:33

I hope they will.

Speaker 2: 10:34

It's silly to do that to others.

Speaker 3: 10:37

And they undoubtedly will.

Speaker 2: 10:38

Yes, there's plenty.

Speaker 3: 10:39

What they will base that on. I don't know. I slightly fear for the historians. This is a different subject, but historians of the future are going to have a difficult time.

Speaker 3: 10:48

I mean it's fine for me in the 20th century because that's where my history paddles around, because everyone wrote everything down. You know there's a massive amount of material and the sort of things I write depend entirely, really, on having a super abundance of written and recorded memoir and so on in the future. I mean, we all think that we're keeping a record on these little machines that we all carry around. We're not. That's all completely ephemeral. If you think you're going to be able to access your emails or someone else is going to be able to access your text messages in 50 years' time, think again. There's a big black historical hole about to happen and the only things that will be really studyable, I fear, are things that people have deliberately written down in order to leave a record. Now those are probably going to be official and they're going to be memoirs and those are completely unreliable.

Speaker 2: 11:42

Right, there's so many directions we can take from here, but to counter that.

Speaker 1: 11:48

I wonder if our current virality and the way that we spread news and the way that we share things will change how history is passed on from here on in, because you didn't have that virality with any of the sources that you're talking about. They were written down, it was intentional, it was a single story, a single voice from that point of view, and we seem to descend into a sort of lowest common denominator of what is proliferated, which isn't necessarily the truth.

Speaker 3: 12:15

Well, there's a huge proliferation, but it's not being archived or preserved. I mean, there's just masses of it. I mean, how do you take a snapshot of what happened today in a viral digital world? How do you really take a record? Well, the answer is actually people are doing this in the National Archives. There is a whole body of people who comb the net all the time and archive what they think and that's got to be subjective is what happened today. But, as you know, that's changing every millisecond. What is happening today?

Speaker 3: 12:50

Every single news outlet, even the official sources, are being changed and constantly adapted and moving. So where is history? Where do you put a pin? How do you hold it down? And, more to the point, I think we all write everything these days. We, or we think we do, you know, we think every text message, we think every email, we think every instagram is, is a sort of, is a, is a little part of history that we're preserving. Well, we're not, because that stuff is, you know, unless you're gchq and can access it, that stuff's gone. So I mean, do you know anyone who archives their emails?

Speaker 2: 13:25

I don't. I do once in a while. Yeah, Do you? I just download the whole thing, yeah. I obviously love letters, but those are different, especially your spam I download that.

Speaker 3: 13:37

I think it's an interesting thing. And also, you know, official history is quite interesting too. I mean, again, in my little speciality of espionage. I know for a fact that the intelligence agencies go through their archives and weed out the stuff they don't want to leave for posterity.

Speaker 2: 13:54

Right, so let's get on that, because I think this is an interesting conversation to have. Herodotus has a very clear view on the Persians. Marx looked at history all from an economic viewpoint. People who write about history historically also, as you say, were subjective about how they're recounting it, and these are the sources that we're reading when we're looking at that history. So how do we actually know what is true, what actually happened?

Speaker 3: 14:24

I think anyone who approaches history thinking that what they're telling is a version of the truth is already in very dangerous territory. Right, because history isn't truth. History is story, and all stories, all narratives are completely subjective. I mean we choose the stories we want to tell ourselves. Subjective, I mean we choose the stories we want to tell ourselves. You know, as Alice Munro said, you know, fiction is really is the narrative that we use to make sense of our lives, and that is as true of historical study as any other. So I think the idea that we're somehow producing a kind of version of sort of absolute reality, that's not what we do.

Speaker 3: 15:02

It's funny, I mean, because I write narrative, nonfiction history, people sometimes say oh well, you know, you must be leaving out bits that don't fit your story and you must be shaping the narrative and this must be partly fictionalised. Well, the truth is it isn't fictionalised. I never make anything up, but yes, of course I'm leaving out stuff that bores me or doesn't help my narrative or doesn't move it along. But historians have always done that, from Herodotus onwards. I mean, if Herodotus got to a dull bit of the Persian story, he just left it out. So, as we all do.

Speaker 3: 15:35

So I think there's much less of a distinction between the school of sort of scholarly history my father's school, if you like. I mean you know he was a proper, proper scholar. He was all about the footnotes and the sources and so on and the sort of stuff that I and other narrative nonfiction writers. It's not so broad, not so wide. I think that we're all doing the same thing, which is some of us admit it, but that doesn't mean you're falsifying anything. I think that reality, truth, whatever you want to call it, is more interesting than fiction I mean, I think you know most of the mad things I write.

Speaker 3: 16:11

If you put them in a novel, people would say well, that's preposterous, and that's, that couldn't possibly happen. It's, you know. And that's half the fun is finding stuff that seems completely unlikely and yet is real. Is true? I hesitate to say true, it is real.

Speaker 3: 16:28

Or it happened, it happened it happened, but the spin that I may put on it is the same as Herodotus and Nemean and whoever else will have put their own spin on too. So it's not. Spin isn't again quite the right word. For me, the key thing is narrative, is story.

Speaker 3: 16:44

Right the right word. For me, the key thing is narrative. Is story? Right it's. That's where my line lies is. Unless I discover something in the research for my books that takes my story onto the next page, I'm not interested in it and I don't put it in, whereas, you know, a kind of all embracing historian would say well, you have to put everything in, you know, otherwise it's not a sort of comprehensive story. So that's fine, I mean, that's okay, I just come from a different angle on that. So what's the?

Speaker 2: 17:10

right process here Because, say, 200 years from now, when people look at the history of the early 21st century and they read accounts of the Indians writing about how India is really the emerging power of the world, or the Chinese are talking about the way they see the world, with the Americans being this really evil for the country that's leading and is so powerful and is using its power to corrupt the world, or the Americans writing about the Chinese and about themselves, how do we piece together the reality, quote, unquote what really happened or what actually happened, to be honest, of the early 21st century, but I mean that is what sort of historical study encourages one to do is to take the source to read it with a careful and objective eye and say why is this person telling me this in the way that they're telling me this?

Speaker 3: 18:02

So the context.

Speaker 2: 18:03

You know now of the 21st century but maybe in 200 years. It's hard to piece that context together.

Speaker 3: 18:10

I think, no harder than it is for you or I to look back on the Persian Empire or, you know, nazi apologists in the beginning of the 20th century and say, okay, the reason why they're telling me this in this way is because in the context of their times, this is the line they were pushing and that's half the fun. It's half the fun of dealing with even micro sources. People are wonderfully unreliable narrators of their own lives and I find that fascinating. So I love it when I find a new source. This is particularly true of spies who, while they're supposed to be discreet, actually love telling their own stories but are often fabulists. They're often people who make it all up. So half the fun is taking what purports to be a kind of honest source and going, hmm, okay, he's telling me that because this is the line he's taking. So that will be true of our history as much as it is of any history.

Speaker 3: 19:10

We will look at the pronouncements that come out of Moscow. We will look at the political campaigns in the US. We will look at Chinese propaganda and we will say, ok, we see where they were coming from. It doesn't mean we have to dismiss it all. You know, it's not necessarily all of it propagandist and misleading, but some of it certainly is, and that is part of the.

Speaker 3: 19:32

I guess the muscle that one tries to work on in history is to use one's natural scepticism but not allow it to blank one off From what I think is an important point, which is that we and this is often misunderstood that we are the same as our forebears in many important ways. We're different in lots of other ways. Our education is different, our point of view is different, but our human instincts, I think, are something that sort of rolls down over time and that if you can get inside the head of your medieval knight or your sort of Nazi apologist, you're stepping towards a kind of understanding of why human beings behave in the way they do. I mean, I'm a sort of propagandist for history because I don't know why anyone would study anything else. I mean, it's got everything in it.

Speaker 2: 20:21

I suppose that's also why you say it is not so important what's in the curriculum. It's actually about the act of understanding that other people at other times had other perspectives and exploring that it's written in.

Speaker 3: 20:33

Why tell us why they are saying this? Look at line seven. Why is he? Why is he saying that? And it's not? It's? You are not encouraged to say this relates to the piece of amya. You're encouraged to say right, this person was on this side and the reason they're framing it that way is because they were looking at it this way. That's, that's, that's great.

Speaker 1: 21:00

That's exactly how you should read a newspaper exactly how you should listen to a television program. Do you think we still have the freedom to do that? I mean, a lot of history is now being looked at out of context and in the context of our current social mores and fashion. To your point earlier on, if, when, whether it's Rhodes, whether it's taking down the statue of Gladstone, whether it's saying that Virginia Woolf was a racist and so we shouldn't study any of her literature, or that this kind of cancellations of historical figures from the past that are being held up to a new scrutiny.

Speaker 3: 21:35

Do I think that there's a danger that we're all going to end up in sort of silos of history where we yeah, I think there is a danger. I mean, there is a danger that we sort of as with opinion in a digital world, that we are fed what we want to hear, um, and that we then reproduce what we have heard and therefore it all becomes sort of chopped up into well, it's a mulch.

Speaker 1: 21:55

It's like if, if we're only serving our current comfort zone and what we find are acceptable, it's incredibly easy to only look at it from one point of view.

Speaker 2: 22:08

My thesis would be most people who've written about history probably did that, though.

Speaker 1: 22:13

Or let's put it this way.

Speaker 2: 22:15

There are people who would try to be objective, as they were doing this, but Karl Marx clearly wasn't objective. He had a very clear idea about what he wanted to say about history and he said that and he saw everything through that lens and everything was a nail to him.

Speaker 3: 22:28

But he thought he was being perfectly objective, exactly as everyone does.

Speaker 1: 22:32

But didn't he also think he was being transgressive? He was reacting to a conservatism that he wanted to smash up and change.

Speaker 3: 22:42

I think he would have said that he was seeing a reality that no one else had spotted the pattern of before.

Speaker 2: 22:48

Right, so do the wokesters today maybe.

Speaker 3: 22:51

Yeah, or the anti-wokesters. I mean it's the same thing, but isn't it great that we can debate it? I do think we should momentarily celebrate that, that we can, in the free world, take a look at history and watch its distortions happening. Watch it happening, you know, challenge it when it's turned around on us. So you can't do that in Russia. There's a narrative. And if you don't abide by that narrative, you're a heretic. I mean, we're back to really dangerous.

Speaker 1: 23:23

You don't think in America. Let's say, perhaps that's more extreme at the moment than england, depends which silo you're living in, but you don't think that we could be accused of the same in the west no, I think the culture wars which is terribly overused phrase are actually evidence of a debate, that they're not evidence of a sort of preponderant attitude.

Speaker 3: 23:42

They're. They're evidence that there is a view on one side and there is a very different view on the other, and the two are going at it hammer and tongs. That's great. I think you know three cheers for the culture wars in some ways, except that both sides try to correct history.

Speaker 3: 24:00

And I think if you approach it as something that can be corrected, you know you're in dangerous territory here. I mean, a good example of this recently was a book I wrote about Kolditz in which one of the characters was Douglas Bader, who was the legless flying ace of the Second World War, who was a tremendous hero when I was growing up. I mean, there were books about him, there were films about him. He was a great man who sort of kept going. The thing about Bader was that he was incredibly brave, he was very inspiring to people of a certain generation, but he was also a total monster. I mean, he was just a very, very nasty man, even particularly by the lights of his own time it's. You know, he was racist and he was ghastly, he was rude, he was arrogant. But people at the time said that.

Speaker 3: 24:45

And so when I wrote out, I did a pretty good demolition job on Douglas Pardlett, which was both pleasurable and a bit controversial, because you know, one side said, ah, this is woke. There was Lee Anderson, 30p Lee, the former Tory, now reform MP, took total objection to this and said it's disgraceful. You know, this is attacking our heroes. And the other side, you know, said oh, it's great, you know, this is attacking our heroes, um, and the other side, you know, said oh, it's great, you know, finally we get a proper picture of but. But so both sides, in a way, were sort of trying to correct the past. I guess I was too to some extent. I wanted to sort of take a look at a myth and and begin to sort of dismantle it, or at least look at it a bit more clearly. But you know so, and that will happen, of our time too, undoubtedly, people will. You know, there will be those who will be assaulting Trump, there will be those who will be defending him, you know, and that's good, that's great.

Speaker 2: 25:43

Right, you said something earlier that made me think of a question and I'd love to hear your thoughts. There's a notion of agent theory and structure theory in history agent theory meaning that the individuals matter, structure theory meaning that the times matter. Uh, where do you fall?

Speaker 3: 26:02

well of course, you know exactly what I'm going to say individuals.

Speaker 2: 26:05

Of course you need both. I mean of course you do, because you know characters, don't?

Speaker 3: 26:09

operate out with the world that they come from, and that world is shaped by individuals. But I mean, this is the old historical conundrum, isn't it? Is it the great man theory of?

Speaker 2: 26:19

history yes yes man.

Speaker 3: 26:20

Yes exactly or is it? Are we talking about movements? And of course it's both.

Speaker 2: 26:26

What is more important, let's make this a little bit spicier here.

Speaker 3: 26:30

Okay, let me rephrase your case. What is more interesting? Fair, if you want, I will take character, of course I mean because yeah but that's what you're left.

Speaker 3: 26:38

That's why I figured you would answer that yeah I mean that's, you know I, I, I want to know what people thought and felt. I don't. I'm less interested in how the economic agrarian situation in suffolk had an impact on you know how a certain. I mean it's just that's not my kind of history. I mean it's interesting enough, but you know I'm also, you know I'm not that interested in how agricultural techniques changed in the 11th century.

Speaker 3: 27:05

I mean, what I love is trying to establish a connection between me, the writer, the reader, and the characters that I'm creating. So I love it when people emerge, if they occasionally do, saying you know, I felt a sort of community with that person, or I felt, didn't feel a community with that person that I thought I was going to, or, you know, isn't it extraordinary that he behaved that way? I wonder if I would have done. I love history and I love writing history. That asks, actually, quite a simple question, which we often lose sight of, which is what would you do, what would you as an individual, if plonked into this, into Kolditz or into, I don't know, the siege of the Iranian embassy or whatever? What would you do? Which of these characters would you be?

Speaker 3: 27:49

Because we're not so different from our forebears and you can apply that to almost anything. It's difficult when you don't have sufficient resources, which is why I am a 20th century historian. That is where I can find sufficient material to be able to say this is what she felt, this is what he saw, this is what the room smelled like, what she felt, this is what he saw, this is what the room smelled like. Because then you can carry your reader along with you, I hope, and and put them into the circumstances that you're creating in the book and ask that question say, okay, you're, you're in cold. What are you going to do? I mean, I never put it as obviously as that, but you know characters. We sort of think as individuals, don't we? That we can anticipate how we will behave in certain circumstances, but of course, we can't.

Speaker 1: 28:37

Well, we think wishfully about it, don't? We, we do, and that's why history is often framed as heroes and villains, and I think why your books are so enticing is you don't perfect the characters, whereas as we learn history, we learn that stalin is in this camp and yeah, uh, I don't know. You know mandela or?

Speaker 3: 28:57

stalin in this camp.

Speaker 3: 28:58

Bad, bad mandela hooray um, you open that door and enable the whole character well, I find it's partly because I I find I mean, the research process is long and solitary and actually I like living with real people, not with kind of plastic or cardboard figures, that sort of totter onto the stage and then totter off again. It's much more interesting for me to be with people that I believe in and that's everybody really, because everybody's human, including ones that whose behavior we may find utterly reprehensible. You know, that's they're the interesting ones, are the ones that have come down to us as sort of monsters or heroes.

Speaker 1: 29:41

I remember you said once that, um, I think it was to do with agent sonia, what, whatever it was two or three years that you'd spent researching her story at the beginning of one of these journeys. You have to like the person enough because you know you're going to spend a long time with that person? How contaminated do you get?

Speaker 3: 30:02

well, she's a very good example, I mean for your listeners who may not know. She was a communist spy, highly successful, probably the most successful woman intelligence agent of the 20th century, but largely unknown. And she spied for the communist regime and she was a pretty dyed in the wool Stalinist. But she was incredibly brave and I had a very ambivalent relationship with her. I mean, I and I did have a relationship with her. I was sort of half in love with her and a half I found her completely repellent with her sort of ideological certainty and her sort of moral rectitude. But by God, she was something. I mean she was quite a creature. She ended up in the Cotswolds, believe it or not, as a sort of housewife, where she appeared to be a perfectly ordinary kind of British housewife, In reality she'd built a radio transmitter in the privy in the back garden and was sending the blueprints for the atomic bomb to Moscow. She was high-grade stuff. But yes, I lived with her for three years.

Speaker 1: 30:56

Was making cupcakes.

Speaker 3: 30:57

While making cupcakes and, you know, going to church and attending the local fete. I mean again, if you made that up in a novel people would say that's absolutely preposterous. So, yes, I have to live with these people and I do develop a relationship with them, and that is often an ambivalent relationship, as all relationships are. No relationships are pure, you know pure. I mean we like to think they are, but I fall in and out of love with my characters as I'm writing about them.

Speaker 3: 31:24

But as I'm saying that, I can hear my late father's voice saying you have no business having any love affair or otherwise with your characters, just stand back. But then with mine you can't really, because you're sort of plunged into this narrative. You're there with them and often you don't really know where you're going, which is certainly during the research process, which is incredibly good, fun actually, because it becomes a sort of adventure. Often the conundrum that I'm trying to pose is here is this person? If it's a sort of biographically led book, how do I unlock them? How do I find out? What are the levers and sort of machinery of their psychology that makes them work?

Speaker 2: 32:04

Yeah, I find that fascinating and looking at the individual. But I really do also like thinking about if Sonia hadn't been there, had somebody else stepped up and filled that void. The same way I think about you know, the circumstances of post-world war one. Germany would have definitely led to a strong man rising, whether it was you know, if you, if you go back and kill baby hitler, I think somebody else would have kind of come up and filled that vacuum. Yeah, exactly filled that vacuum. So I I like at least theorizing about those things in a way well, it's both again, isn't it?

Speaker 3: 32:36

I mean, would they? I mean I don't know, maybe not? I mean, I don't think there's an inevitability about that. You need the catalyst, you need the individual to kind of represent.

Speaker 1: 32:46

Would that was maybe I'm not sure you think history is more accidental I think it contains a great deal of accident.

Speaker 3: 32:53

I think the unintended consequences of human behaviour are fascinating. We all think that somehow there's a logic to it, but there isn't. I mean mostly what happens is not intended, it's not inevitable, it's not ontological, it's not necessarily leading on to the thing that you think it's going to.

Speaker 2: 33:11

The counterfactual to that is that you see various different people working on similar scientific breakthroughs at the same time quite often so for instance, as albert einstein was working on special relativity, somebody else was working on it too. Yeah, if you look at, you know copernicus and galileo, different eras, kepler they all started working on this. Yeah, it's 100 years give or take between them, but they eventually got there right. And maybe it's different with science.

Speaker 3: 33:39

I think it is slightly, because it's cumulative. You know one builds automatically on the other and you can't unknow the knowledge of the predecessors and your colleagues and your contemporaries.

Speaker 1: 33:49

Well, the feminist movement then?

Speaker 3: 33:51

Okay well and the fascist movement, if you like, I leagues and your contemporaries, well. The feminist movement, then, okay. Well, and the fascist movement, if you like. I mean, you know that was also operating at the same time at different people, but again, it's your, it's your to your point it is. You know there are both movements and characters and the two work together. Sonia is a good example, you know, would. Would someone else have done what she was doing? Probably, possibly, because the great communist movement that was sweeping the world at that time was creating people like her.

Speaker 1: 34:16

But probably not a woman. But probably not a woman. I mean, that seemed to be the unique element to that story.

Speaker 3: 34:20

There were other women agents around. I mean, part of her success was that she was a woman.

Speaker 3: 34:26

I mean, you know, she was invisible to a certain sort of man on either side of the Iron Curtain and that worked hugely to her advantage, would so. So maybe she is an accident, I mean, maybe she is the outlier, I mean maybe she isn't the kind of the, but nonetheless she was very much a product of her time. She would have not have been the person that she was had she not grown up in weimar germany, had she not seen the march of fascism approaching, had she not been converted, as so many young Germans young and old Germans to the left of communism. So yeah, she's a product of movements and beliefs and ideology and her own extreme personality, I would say. I mean, that's what makes her interesting is that she's both part of a trend, if you like, and bucks it and do you think that um history, you know you're not allowed to, to say it's both this time okay um, do you think that the arc of history does always point towards justice?

Speaker 2: 35:26

is there moral progress?

Speaker 1: 35:29

yes, I do, actually increasing justice. I should say I do.

Speaker 3: 35:33

I do With obvious moments when it doesn't you know, the moments when it goes absolutely horribly in the other direction. Have is generally better today than it was yesterday and markedly better for most people than it was 50 years ago.

Speaker 1: 36:00

And so just to bring it back to the curriculum or what it is that we should be teaching in schools about history this current trend of saying that the younger generation at the moment is buggered, that there is no hope, that you're living in a time where you should be despairing, and these feelings are valid and we're going to continue to legitimise these feelings Is it incumbent upon us to actually give them a slightly more optimistic baton to pass on? But I don't think they are buggered.

Speaker 3: 36:32

I don't think they are either. I, I mean who says they are? Well, I don't think they are either. I mean, I think they're equipped with better weapons and tools than we ever were to look at their world clearly.

Speaker 1: 36:43

I agree, but that's not the narrative.

Speaker 3: 36:45

The other camp it's not the narrative from one camp, it is from.

Speaker 2: 36:48

Yeah, If I had to steal my own argument of the other camp. Childhood poverty has increased in the UK, which we've seen. There's environmental catastrophe on the horizon on so many different fronts.

Speaker 1: 37:00

That's been created by Exactly that they've inherited.

Speaker 2: 37:01

There's a massive poly crisis basically, also with AI going to take everybody's jobs, etc. Etc. So you could fall into that.

Speaker 3: 37:07

I'm not a Pollyanna, I'm not pretending that those things aren't there or that there aren't enormous challenges, but it seems to me that my children's generation are fully aware of them, switched onto them, prepared to tackle them in a way that perhaps our generation wasn't or didn't want to see them or didn't want to see what was coming. Look, I sound like a sort of what is he called Per Panelli in Condi, where everything is getting better all the time and it's the best for the possible world. It's not like that. You know, we're not in a sort of Enlightenment age where everything is improving. But it seems to me that the younger generation isn't buggered. I think they are. They're understandably angry and engaged some of the ones that I know and they have a view of history which I think is really important. They see the past and they well, listen. Again, I'm sort of trying to speak for the whole generation which is mine, but it seems to me that they are aware of what's happened in the past and they realise that you can't understand what's happening in the present, let alone what might happen in the future, unless you have a sort of real grip on how we got here.

Speaker 3: 38:12

What are the things in the past that have brought us to this past. I mean, I'm not a great. You know what is it George Santay's thing of? You know, if you don't understand history, you're condemned to repeat it. Well, if you don't understand history, you're condemned to repeat that particular epigram, which is sort of incredibly boring and doesn't get you very far. But if you're a young person, you want to know why we are in this situation. You have to understand what has happened in the past to bring us here.

Speaker 3: 38:38

And I think there is a general awareness of that. I mean, if you look at the newspapers I mean my own newspaper we have a history correspondent. We have somebody whose sole job it is to look at the past and tell us about it. Now, that wouldn't have happened a generation ago. We didn't have history correspondence. Why would you? That's why, for me, a breaking story is about 1945. We're right on the cutting edge of what's just happened. But I think that I'm joking, but it is true. I think there is a sense that a general cultural sense that the past actually really matters.

Speaker 2: 39:17

The podcast.

Speaker 3: 39:17

The Rest Is History is one of the most successful podcasts ever. And that's an incredibly broad brush that goes everywhere, right? So I think we are engaged in the past in ways that we haven't ever been before.

Speaker 2: 39:32

I think the point that Natasha makes is quite dear to my heart, because I also always try to end these podcasts on a positive note, even if we end up veering into talking about what's problematic right now, because I do feel that if we don't have that positive vision at least the destination then we don't know what progress is, we don't know if we're actually taking steps towards that or if we're just bumbling around in the dark and just completely randomly finding our way through the woods.

Speaker 1: 39:58

Well, the word dystopian used to be attributed to sci-fi books mostly, and a projection of a future that we could imagine in darkest moments, and it's become a word that I think the column inches that have been devoted to that word. Every single day I read it.

Speaker 2: 40:15

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 40:15

That has to be an indication of something.

Speaker 2: 40:18

It's actually a good point. Google lets you look at the prevalence of one word versus another in the index and it would be interesting to see what the ratio has been in, say in the 80s, between utopia and dystopia. I would say right now, just my hunch, that dystopia gets 10x the amount of column inches as utopia does.

Speaker 3: 40:37

But in a way isn't that like all sort of trendy words on the net, it just gets repeated.

Speaker 1: 40:41

I don't think we are in a dystopia.

Speaker 3: 40:45

I think that's nonsense Fair. I think we've got huge problems, but dystopia. I'm totally with you got huge problems but dystopia and that's like saying that we live. I mean, if you take the other end, you know people saying we live in it. We have at some point lived in a utopia? We definitely haven't yeah I mean, I think I think it's one of those extreme words that people knock around because it makes makes us all feel worse. I think the point is more.

Speaker 2: 41:08

I totally agree with you. By the way, I'm a techno optimist and very hopeful. Omid means hope in Farsi so. I'm all team hope, but the point I was trying to make sure that the future, which could be dystopian if you don't elect me, I'm here to fix it right, trump does it, everyone does it.

Speaker 3: 41:37

I'm the person who's going to ward off this dystopian thing that's coming down the tracks. Well, like it isn't. I mean it just isn't. I mean, look, it's not perfect, it's not perfect at all, but technologically, the world has access to tools that it could never have dreamt of before. The opportunities for advancement and knowledge and cultural enrichment are spectacular, and I think we also.

Speaker 3: 42:03

One of the products of the digital age is that, while we are all very susceptible to propaganda, we're also much more aware of what propaganda is and that when we may be being fed propaganda. So I think there are two edges to that sword as well. There is a tendency to live in silos, to sort of hear only what we want to hear in the echo chamber of our existing beliefs. On the other hand, I think people are also aware and more sceptical of what they hear. Sometimes that expresses itself in a kind of plague on all your houses. All media is corrupt. Everyone's lying to us all the time which they're not. I mean, most media actually is attempting to tell you the truth. Listen, I sound again like an apologist, for the newspapers.

Speaker 3: 42:46

But the truth is say what you like about journalists, they're mostly trying to tell you the truth, unlike lawyers.

Speaker 2: 42:53

I think this is a sidebar, but let me throw it out there anyway. I believe that has always existed. There was always a reality-based group and there was always an echo chamber-based group, and I think the bifurcation is much clearer now and it's very obvious who is actually reality-based or is trying to be reality-based and who is not right. And I think what you just said is very true for the reality-based group. But I also do think that the not reality-based group is banding together in numbers much more efficiently now than they have ever had in the past I think that is true also.

Speaker 3: 43:30

It seems that the younger generation, whatever that is, is also looking increasingly for sources of information that are dispassionate and objective, and or appear to be. I mean, nobody's perfect that way, but there are these various things popping up all over the place that the sort of 20, 30 year olds are looking at and trying to kind of feel their way round the echo chambers.

Speaker 1: 43:55

And an acknowledgement of how important it is not to lose that thread of fact-based news.

Speaker 3: 44:03

Yeah, and you don't have to believe what you're told.

Speaker 1: 44:05

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 44:06

You don't have to. That doesn't mean you have to be sceptical or cynical about everything, because that's an extreme as well, but judgment. We go back to the history curriculum. You're given a piece. Skeptical or cynical about everything, because that's an extreme as well, but judgment it's. We go back to the the history curriculum. You're given a piece of paper and it's up to you to work out that. What is that tone of voice? What is, what is the agenda here? Why is is that really true? That x number are doing why? You know so. So we? I think there is a sort of questioning going on alongside the unquestioning that's going on. To put, to put what you've just said in a slightly different way there is the unquestioning group that just wants to hear its own prejudices and its own beliefs validated, but alongside it there's the questioning group that's saying, ok, it's not quite like that.

Speaker 1: 44:48

So just to go into a slightly more playful realm, if you could choose a period of history to go back to and live in, but just for a week, not live your whole life in, but to visit, which would it be, and it can't be I've got a week 45, oh god no well I've only got a week yeah, on the other week, okay, well, I think, to witness the Bolshevik revolution would have been utterly fascinating I think.

Speaker 3: 45:19

I mean terrifying but, but truly momentous this was 1914.

Speaker 2: 45:24

What was it 1917? 17, sorry, yeah, um.

Speaker 3: 45:28

Yeah, I mean, I think that would have been extraordinary. And we talk about watersheds in history and it's much overused in these sort of hinge moments where everything changes. But there are a few. They do happen 9-11, second World War, you know D-Day. There are moments where the world turns on its axis and I would say that the Communist Revolution created the pattern on which the rest of that century ran. What's so fascinating is that then, of course, at the end of the century, it all changes again, it all disappears. So if I had a second shot, may I have a second shot. I'll do the week of the Berlin Wall coming down Interesting.

Speaker 3: 46:05

One of my big regrets was that I didn't.

Speaker 1: 46:08

But you were here. Then I was here, but I wasn't there.

Speaker 3: 46:11

Oh, okay, and I had an opportunity to be there. It's one of my huge regrets. I was working in a newspaper office and somebody said this is extraordinary, we need to get on a plane, we need to go to Berlin, we need to see this happening. And I think I said, oh, I've got dinner tonight. I'm not going to do that, which I bitterly regret, and I bitterly regret, and I should have just climbed on the plane and gone there, but really hadn't all the work happened, wasn't it the run-up to that?

Speaker 1: 46:35

Why is the actual moment of watching that?

Speaker 3: 46:38

So if I can do the run-up to the collapse of communism, then I've got months, I've got years. Can I do the run-up to the Russian Revolution? That's great. I can go back to the Tsar's time and work my way through all of that. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean. But that's the way with dramatic moments, isn't? It is that they quintessentialize something that has been brewing. I mean, you can say the same of 9-11. Yeah, you can say the same of the assassination of jfk. I mean you can find, you should find stories that create the dramatic moment.

Speaker 1: 47:11

Well, that goes back to the agent theory, structure theory isn't it yes?

Speaker 2: 47:14

yes.

Speaker 1: 47:15

That there are these build-ups and there is an inevitability that is bent on the falling of the wall. Well, that's dangerous too, isn't it?

Speaker 3: 47:22

Because if we look at history backwards through the wrong end of the telescope and we say, well, this is always going to happen, but it's always looked at backwards, it's always re-reviewed. It backwards. It's always rear view. It is. But if we assume that that what happened is an inevitable result of the build-up to it.

Speaker 1: 47:35

That's that takes out a tendency to do, we do but that takes out accident and yeah, causality is easy to spot in hindsight, obviously yeah, and sort of madness.

Speaker 3: 47:44

People do very strange things without even knowing why they're doing them. You know it's individuals play a huge part.

Speaker 2: 47:53

You know Lee Harvey Oswald yeah.

Speaker 3: 47:58

Was he inevitable? Absolutely not. You know, was the death of JFK definitely going to happen? No, you know, had it not happened, had that particular very strange person not had the set of? I mean, let's not get into the conspiracy elements of this, but I mean, the reality of that is that this was someone who was behaving in an unhinged way out of their own volition. Had that not happened, the world would have been utterly different. So, but I'm not in favour of what if history?

Speaker 3: 48:24

because I think that you end up with sort of so what history?

Speaker 1: 48:27

Yeah, so you don't believe that there is an inevitability? Let's say, empires fall or the arc of history, as we said, always leans slightly more in favour of justice and progress.

Speaker 3: 48:40

We've only had a few empires. I mean, when you look at it, I mean, and they've all fallen. So yeah, and the pattern would suggest that that is what's going to happen. But inevitable, I don't think anything is inevitable. The March of the Third Reich was inevitable, wasn't it? I mean, that was presented as an inevitable thing and people at the time assumed that it was.

Speaker 2: 49:01

The problem with all this stuff is the resolution with which you look at it. If you think about deep time, for instance, the 1st of January 12 am being when this planet was created we came about at like 11, 15 pm being when this planet was created. We came about at like 11 15 pm on the 31st of december, so we really only had 15 minutes on this deep time scale yeah of data to suggest what is going on. So you know makes me incredibly glad.

Speaker 3: 49:26

I'm not a historian of deep time where you find the evidence.

Speaker 2: 49:29

I mean so you know, lee harvey arsfeld, you right, but like how consequential was it really? If you look at, say, a millennium right, would the things still would have happened the way they would have happened.

Speaker 3: 49:40

So it always depends on the resolution, true of the revolution, true of 9-11, true of everything it's a flash in the time, but in terms of our time and our understanding, of how we as human beings in this century behave. Those moments are critically important.

Speaker 1: 49:55

I agree. So what are the quantum leaps then?

Speaker 3: 49:59

The hinge moments.

Speaker 2: 50:00

Yes, exactly.

Speaker 1: 50:03

I think well Over the last couple of hundred years.

Speaker 3: 50:06

Well, the French Revolution changes everything. Why? It captures and quintessentializes an attitude of thought that changes the way we think forever. I mean it is, it's absolutely pivotal um the russian revolution. Similarly um, I would say, the kind of independence and nationalist movements of the 19th century have huge impact on the growth of nation states.

Speaker 1: 50:35

Imperialism.

Speaker 3: 50:36

Imperialism, the consolidation of power, the rise of a global world, international relations, international economics. That's all happening in the 19th century and it's absolutely vital, and there are key figures that tell you that story. The First World War is the end of a Victorian era and the beginning of a modern era, and still, I think, an event that we don't fully appreciate for what it was. It was an absolute cataclysm that threw everything in the air and dropped it. But again, okay, you're an agent of history. If Gavrilo Princip had not had a pizza?

Speaker 3: 51:14

on the corner of Sarajevo. If he hadn't stopped to do that, the Archduke's carriage would not have passed at the point that it did. He would not have opportunistically thought oh, I might as well use this bomb. Yeah, would the First World War have happened? Well, I don't know.

Speaker 1: 51:30

Maybe, maybe not. These are all things that we've learnt and that are very much in our vernacular. And, to go back to the curriculum idea, what are the seismic shifts? Or, as we start to look at history through different prisons and through perhaps the victims rather than the victors point of view that we're going to come up with other moments?

Speaker 3: 51:54

I suppose my take on this would be rather specialist and perhaps a little self-serving, but there is a whole secret history that has taken place, unseen, unknown to the public, undeclassified, that I love working in, because this sounds an odd thing to say Espionage intelligence doesn't usually make a great deal of difference to the world. It oils the wheels of traditional diplomacy. It allows states to keep their citizens safe. Sometimes it also can make them markedly more unsafe when intelligence gets it wrong. You know, the Iraq War is a very good example of that, but on the whole it doesn't tip the dial hugely.

Speaker 3: 52:35

Sometimes it does, and when it does it tips it in a very, very dramatic way, but in a way that we haven't known about hitherto, because this is a secret world, this is a hidden world. The documents that tell this story have been classified and the people who were involved have been sworn to silence and secrecy. That is all changing and for me that's fantastic, because you are able to find moments in history that nobody knew about and yet radically changed our worlds. Um, you know so the d-day deception, for example I mean when I was growing up, that story was presented to us as a feat of arms was you know it was about bombs and bullets and guns and brave men on beaches and da-da-da.

Speaker 1: 53:16

And that's double-cross. That's the double-cross story. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 53:20

But behind that and underpinning it, and without which it might well have failed, is an astonishing story of skullduggery and duplicity and lying. You know really interesting stuff, really interesting individuals who nobody knows about, and they're just wonderful sort of characters who secretly did change the world we live in.

Speaker 3: 53:40

They really did, and the Cold War coughs these up from time to time as well, you know, we again, we think of the Cold War as something inevitable, but in fact the triumph of the West over communism was always going to happen. But beneath that narrative there are these hidden stories that show just how close it came to calamity, and I'm not just talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis. There are other moments that I love exploring that showed that the history and the world that we thought we were in is not quite the world that we were in. There were other things going on. In a way, espionage allows you to write the sorts of stories that novelists usually corner. I know, natasha, you're a huge consumer of fiction and I love reading novels. But the wonderful thing about true spy stories is that if you have the right material, you can tackle the things that make novels come alive.

Speaker 3: 54:38

Loyalty, love, betrayal, adventure, romance, human interactions that seem to be going in the wrong direction, stories that sort of turn on a pivot suddenly, and so that's, in a way, why I love all of that, but again, partly because they've not been told before.

Speaker 1: 54:53

Yeah, because they couldn't be told before.

Speaker 3: 54:55

It is one of the great sea changes in our culture. I mean, up until about 1995, it was illegal to even report the colour of the carpets inside MI6. These institutions did not officially exist. Everything was deniable. Everything was denied. What came out was heavily mythologized and usually made up. You know, I owe a huge debt to Tony Blair who ruled that we start unlocking this stuff, that secrecy is not an eternal silence. You know history is very useful. You have to have secrecy. Let's be honest, intelligence doesn't work unless you have secrecy. But there's a limit. And so these stories have started to bubble out and bubble under, and I love those. I think they are, yeah. So there are the big moments of history and then there are the hidden pivots that we are only just beginning to know about, and they will come up. There will be more of them. I mean, there will be histories of the Ukrainian war will be written.

Speaker 1: 55:50

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 55:51

And there will be wars, there will be stories of strategy and tactics and politics, and there's another whole story that will be written, which is about the undercover war, which is really, in a way, why this terrible thing started was that it was all the spies getting it wrong. You know, telling Putin what he wanted to hear, embezzling the money, disappearing. You know there's a whole spy story that is yet to be told about that. I'm looking forward to you writing that If you could find me the sources, that'd be great.

Speaker 2: 56:24

At the moment.

Speaker 3: 56:24

they're pretty well hidden. I think, and I'm pretty convinced there is someone inside the Kremlin, that there are sources in there, because there was, if think you recall this getting off topic here but in the run-up to the outbreak of that war, the CIA was releasing intelligence that it was obtaining in real time. They were saying we know what's happening, we know where it's going to happen, and it was an attempt to sort of ward him off. It didn't work. But I've never seen intelligence produced like that before and absolutely in moments leading up, saying we know now some of that will have been signals intelligence, some of that will have been intercepted, stuff at, and I say in gchq. But some of it sounded to me very like what they call human in a sad job. Yeah, human intelligence that's coming from a person, right? So when I find him i'm'm going to write a book.

Speaker 1: 57:11

Oh, nice, in Putin's world, him Tell us about the siege.

Speaker 3: 57:20

Oh, the siege that's my new one, yes, yeah, that's the story of the 1980 Iranian embassy siege, which, if you were a teenager, as I was in the 1980s, is seared on your memory. And it was that extraordinary terrorist attack on the Iranian embassy led to a six-day siege and it ended with the SAS abseiling down the outside of the building and throwing in smoke, bombs and incendiary devices and liberating the hostages. And it was a talk about pivotal moments. That was a key moment in the Thatcher regime. She'd only been in power for less than a year. The SAS became her army. No one had ever really heard of the SAS up until this point.

Speaker 2: 57:59

Yeah, it put them on the map. Right, it put them on the map and it became so.

Speaker 3: 58:01

It has a historical significance. Many people feel that her behaviour, the attitudes toward the Falklands conflict, sprung directly out of this kind of gung-ho story. And I inherit. I was watching the snooker, as millions were on that day, I was watching my dad and it was the bank holiday, monday, and hurricane higgins and cliff thorburn was coming down to the final frame and they suddenly cut away to this live footage which we'd never seen before on all three channels yes, folks, those under under 25, there were three channels at that point, um, and all three of them were showing this live footage and it was unbelievably exciting.

Speaker 3: 58:37

I think it was one of the reasons why I became a journalist actually was that I'd never seen anything quite so dramatic in real time. It was happening. We forgot about the snooker. Suddenly this was going on. So it also changed our perception of how news works. We're now very used to it with an iphone is filming the news. As it happens, it comes to us streaming direct into the into sort of cultural bloodstream. Then it was quite extraordinary. It had never been seen before and I again, for the reasons that I was sort of explaining, I I love this story because, although we've inherited a kind of mythological view of what happened there.

Speaker 3: 59:11

It was all about butch kind of SAS guys, kind of beating the baddies and so on. The real story is much more complicated than that. The baddies are not so bad. They are complicated, interesting people. They are not, you know, they're not the sort of cardboard villains. And again, one of the reasons I like it as a story I've loved writing it is that it takes place almost entirely in one room.

Speaker 3: 59:37

There's one room inside the embassy that has these 26 hostages in it, and I've spoken to those who are still around and I have memoirs from those who've written them, and so I have, I hope, a pretty clear picture of how those people were interacting with each other, how the hostages were interacting with the gunmen, how the hostages were behaving towards each other, how the police were trying to negotiate them out, how the army was preparing next door to launch this incredible assault.

Speaker 3: 1:00:00

So you've got you can. You can look at the history of that, that brief moment, just a week. You can look at it from all these different perspectives and what you end up with, I hope, is not a story of kind of glorious daring do. It's a story about how ordinary people who did not plan to be in a siege on a monday morning in april in 1980 did not see this coming. Nobody saw it coming. And how did they behave? And they didn't behave in the ways that you might expect, just as we probably plunged into that circumstance not of our making, would possibly not behave in the way that we would like to think we would.

Speaker 2: 1:00:35

Wow, that was a great pitch for the book.

Speaker 3: 1:00:38

I definitely have to read it. I love it.

Speaker 2: 1:00:41

I have to read it now. I have to read it.

Speaker 3: 1:00:43

The Iranian side of it is so fascinating. I mean because if you ask someone in the street what was that, if they remember what that event was about, they'll say, oh, it was the Ayatollah. And we well not open conflict, but they felt they'd get a sympathetic reaction. So you've got these individuals who are not the people that most people think they are. They attacked the fundamentalists, they were anti-fundamentalists, they weren't actually religious at all, they were young, naive, I mean. They were men of violence and they are not going to give away what happened. But they're not the people. Violence and they are not going to give away what happened. But it's um, they're not the people you think. They are nice, and it's been great fun to find out who they are too, because I've tracked down their families and where they come from and they, like everybody, have reasons. They may be the wrong reasons. They might be reasons that we find reprehensible. They have reasons for doing what they did in their world. What they were doing was not just justifiable, it was it was an imperative.

Speaker 2: 1:01:55

Yeah, yeah, they had to do it. Yeah, ben, I'm definitely checking the book out, and so should our listeners, and great having you here. Thanks so much for taking the time. It's been a huge pleasure. Thank you guys thank you you.