 Welcome everyone, thank you for joining us for this online British Library cultural event. My name is Jonah Albert and I am one of the events producers at the library. We are pleased to welcome Dominic Selwood for this evening. His latest book, A History of British Identity in 50 documents has recently been published. In this special lecture he takes a deep dive into our collection to select a few of our treasures which have impacted British identity and can be found in his book. Just a little housekeeping before we get started. If you have any questions for Dominic during the event you can submit them using the question box below. A selection of questions will be put to him after his lecture. Use the menu above to provide us with feedback on the event and also to donate to the British Library if you wish. If you don't already have a copy of Dominic's book click on the bookshop link to order from the British Library. Dominic Selwood is a historian and barrister. He is also a best-selling author and novelist and frequent contributor to national newspapers, radio and television. It is a pleasure to welcome him. Over to you Dominic. Thank you very much Jonah, it's a very great pleasure to be here and good evening, good afternoon and good morning depending on where you are and thank you very much for joining for what will hopefully be a fun tour through some history, documents and exploration of British identity. We're going to look at some wonderful texts but I'd like to start by noting that it's easy to take the existence of these documents for granted as if it was inevitable they would survive but really the fact that they have means that it's quite remarkable when you consider how much the ages usually swallow up not to mention the widespread manuscript bonfires of the Reformation. I recently discovered it's the same with human skeletons. Most disappear pretty quickly unless there are specific conditions which preserve them and the same is true of old documents. So from the outset we should keep a sense of perspective and wonder that so many of these texts are still with us and also an awareness of the ones that are not. There really are myriad ways the destroying hand of time takes vellum and paper. The overarching theme of this talk is identity. It's pretty easy to define as the characteristics that distinguish a person or a group of people from others and on that measure we might think we know what British is but we can often be surprised. The British people over many centuries have been far from one thing and so in more modern times has Britain and Britishness. In this context a bit of research always yields up something unexpected. That really is the theme that I want to explore this evening through the prism of some of what I think are amongst the most fascinating and unique documents in the British library's vaults. Inevitably I'll concentrate most heavily but not exclusively on manuscripts and letters as later printed books remain today in many libraries and so are not particularly and particular to any one library's holdings. The Roman emperor Claudius is not especially well known in Britain other than as the slightly feral narrator in the now ropey looking 1970s television adaptation of I Claudius. However for all his lack of celebrity in Britain Claudius ranks among the individuals who've had the greatest influences on this country's identity. The heart of the Roman world was the Mediterranean Sea and what happened here north of the 50th parallel was of supremely little interest to most Romans until Julius Caesar noticed us in the first century BC. He was busy massacring the Celts of France in his bid for political power when he decided to investigate the misty archipelago that lay across the realm of mighty oceanus girdling the known world. That's the English Channel to us. Britain was at that stage quite literally off the map. Caesar visited twice and each time looked on miserably as his fleet was wrecked by storms while moored off the Kent coast. He rode around a bit but quickly focused back on France. Almost a hundred years later it was the sickly clumsy slightly coarse Claudius who was never meant to be emperor who finally decided to extend the empire beyond the known world. His legions arrived with war elephants and a terrifying fermented fish paste but the thing they brought that has endured until today and that changed Britain forever was writing. With the thump of the centurion's hobnail sandals on the beach and the presence of wax tablets and styluses in knapsacks Britain moved from prehistoric to historic by the magic of the arrival of writing. Of course it's true that a century earlier Caesar noted that the British Druids used the Greek alphabet for writing down their secrets and British coins with Latin inscriptions were circulating from before Claudius's conquest but historians draw lines and AD 43 the Roman conquest of Britain is when our history properly speaking begins. I'm going to say British and Britain throughout for periods even when Britain had not yet come into existence that's not through ignorance but just because it's more straightforward and simple so please forgive the blatant anachronisms. Before the British made documents they had to arrive here. From what is known the very first humans wandered onto the British peninsula around 950,000 BC when Britain was still attached to continental Europe. Actual footprints of these earliest Britons were discovered in 2013 at Hayesborough in Norfolk when storm tides revealed them under the sands. They showed a group of five adults and children on what is now a beach all scampering towards Great Yarmouth. Amazingly they are the oldest human footprints outside Africa. They were however washed away by the sea within a fortnight of discovery. Humans then wandered on and off Britain for hundreds of thousands of years largely dodging the weather. In the ice ages they left because Britain was at times under sheets of ice three miles thick. During the warmth of the interglacials they stayed along with all manner of exotic animals to be hunted. These early Britons are largely anonymous to us. Big game hunters from the continent is pretty much all we can say about them with real certainty. The date to remember is 10,000 BC that is when the permanent settlement of Britain began which has persisted to today. For this entire period the world has been in the Flandrian interglacial so when the next ice age arrives in around a hundred thousand years time depending on global warming we may all head south again for some sun. The people who settled Britain in 10,000 BC are known as the Maglemocians. The most famous of them is Chederman who was recently facially reconstructed. You may remember that he drew headlines in 2018 when a team from the Natural History Museum profiled his DNA and announced that he and the other Maglemocians in Britain had dark brown skin. Around the time of the building of Stone Henge broadly from 3,000 to 1600 BC there were two virtually total replacements of British DNA. First when continental farmers arrived around 4,000 BC and life transformed from roaming and hunting to villages, livestock and crops. And second around 2,500 BC when the Bell Beaker people arrived replacing 90% of the country's existing DNA within just a thousand years. Shortly afterwards we can add our first meaningful identity label as the now tribal people of Britain can along with many peoples of the continent be called Celtic. In this context though it's not a genetic or political term. It means the tribes had aspects of similar culture and language that we can label with the umbrella term Celtic. So when the Roman forces arrived with writing and Jupiter's Thunderbolts in AD 43 Britain's history opened with Mediterranean invaders conquering a mosaic of Celtic tribes. If you look around the country today you don't see much of Roman Britain anymore although it is there if you search for instance under the London Museum in the Wallbrook Mithraeum at Bath and Fishbourne but you do have to seek it out. We haven't retained much in the way of Roman buildings but we preserved something far more durable that affected our identity to a much greater extent. Romanitas that's Roman-ness in the religious and cultural glue that bound the former Roman territories of Europe together for much of the thousand years of the Middle Ages until the Reformation. In this sense the Romans shaped a material part of Britain's identity right down to today. This talk tonight comes out of my book Anatomy of a Nation a history of British identity in 50 documents. So onto the first text Julius Caesar's rather self-congratulatory political propaganda war diaries De Bello Gallica the Gallic War. It's the first text in the book because it is the first written account of life in the British Archipelago. As a military commander and potential conqueror Caesar was interested in everything he could find out about life in Britain. The coastal people he says are all immigrants whereas those in the hinterland are indigenous. Others later disagreed Tacitus just shrugged and said it was impossible to know because they were all barbarians anyway. The people certainly did not look like Romans. Caesar describes everyone as smearing themselves in woad blue cabbage dye which he admits looks intimidating as does the fact that people have long hair but shave everything else off except moustaches. As for their family arrangements he particularly notes that everyone lives in multi-generational polygamous groups with everyone sharing everyone else. Of course whether or not that was true or merely a picturesque way to reinforce the idea of barbarism and demonstrate Caesar's fearlessness in walking among them is impossible to say. Caesar found British charioteers especially fascinating and openly confided that his commanders were fairly terrified by the speed and skill of British chariot warfare. He was also captivated by the Druids who existed across Celtic Europe and observes if anyone wanted to really deepen their studies in Druidry then they came to Britain which was the home of the religion. More broadly he also catalogues everything he thinks of note the criminal law, diet which was heavily carnivorous, the economy, farming practices and so on. No Roman era copies of the Gallic War survive but there are medieval ones as the book remained hugely popular for centuries. The one on the screen is the British Library's oldest copy from the 11th century. For anyone who did Latin at school its opening words are probably still scorched into your brain. Gallia est omnis divisa in Pate's trains also reminiscent of the beginning of asterisks. The initial G is a little faint but note the long S in est and divisa a letter that was common in medieval writing and also the P with a horizontal bar through the descender in Pate's showing that you have to add in the missing letters as medieval scribes wrote with many abbreviations and we shall see more of them. After several centuries of occupation in AD 410 the Romans scampered down the beaches and were gone as the western Roman Empire experienced its long death throws. Scavengers were everywhere and some turned to potentially rich pickings in the British Isles. The British Celts now Romanised and Christian did their best this after all was the age of Arthur. However before long settlers from Holland, Germany and Denmark the Anglo-Saxons were calling the land theirs. In recent years some academics have argued that the term Anglo-Saxon should be retired because groups of racists and white supremacists have adopted and politicised it notably in the United States. However I don't know what the alternative is so for now I like many people I'm still carefully using it but still strictly in its correct historical context. In most contexts it still seems the best and most straightforward term as it was used by the people it describes and it's widely understood. Of the Celts who watched the Anglo-Saxons arrive one stands out. He was an English monk named Gildes and he wrote a letter of lamentation on the barbarity and heathenness of the invaders. Later scholars named his Jeremiah de Exidio et Conquestio Britanniai the ruin and conquest of Britain and it's the principal source for the story of how the Anglo-Saxons took over Britain. The British Library has the oldest copy as you can see though it is very badly damaged and the cause was an event that still makes historians shudder. The antiquarian and MP Sir Robert Cotton collected a treasure house of medieval and early modern manuscripts and his grandson presented it to the nation in 1701. Parliament stored them in Ashburnham House in Westminster but not especially carefully and on the 23rd of October 1731 a fire tore through the collection incinerating or badly damaging many unique sources of the nation's early history. Nevertheless what survived is breathtaking the Lindisfarne Gospels, Beowulf the two earliest copies of bead, five different versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a large number of papal bulls and other charters including two Magna Carta's, maps, bibles and many private papers of the Tudor Monarchs. You will see from my slides that are to come that the press marks of Cotton's manuscripts all have the name of a Roman Emperor and that's because the British Library still preserves his old cataloging system which lists his manuscripts by the bust of the Roman Emperor on top of each of Cotton's original book presses. The Anglo-Saxons arrived as pagans worshipping the Norse Germanic deities but they soon Christianized and that required literacy as Christian salvation depends on rules set out in texts. Anglo-Saxon Britain took to books with gusto and the British Library is rich in the many produced here or imported as part of the wider intellectual and cultural world that Britain now belong to, part of the interconnected family of peoples bound together by the heritage of Rome. In the Anglo-Saxon period Britain produced a spectacular number of books rapidly gaining a reputation for the manufacture of exquisite volumes. One of the most industrious centres of production was the Northeast which created books that continue to entrance and inspire. The Lindisfarne Gospels of course, those of you who were lucky enough to visit the library's spectacular exhibition in 2018-19 on the Anglo-Saxons will have seen others from the same region. The small but spectacular St Cuspot Gospel from the early AD 700s which has the oldest original intact binding on any book in Europe and it's a beautiful deep red-tooled goat skin cover. At the other end of the spectrum is the vast Codex Amiatinus which has lived in Florence since Abbott Kaelfrith of Monk Weymouth Jarrow died in AD 716 while taking it as a gift to Pope Gregory II. His monks actually made three bibles of this uncommon size but the bookburners of the Reformation destroyed the other two although the British Library retains a few sparse and evocative fragments of them. You're going to be relieved to know that I am not good to progress systematically through the chronological history of Britain and its documents. I wanted to use the time until now to set the scene and explain how we became a literate nation and how we shone at book production from a very early age. My book Anatomy of the Nation is an exploration of Britain's history using documents as a vehicle to get us closer to the voices of each age. As you can imagine many of the documents are still in Britain but objects and books and papers move around the world as ambassadors so not all are here. The Codex Amiatinus as we have seen has been in Florence for over 1000 years that puts it into the same category as many cultural objects now far from home and for the record that's fine with me. I don't like cultural nationalism, objects travel and we all learn from their journeys and what they tell us about our shared humanity. Tonight though I'm mainly focusing on documents in this amazing institution's deep collection. One of the biggest joys in researching this book was finding so many stories about or written by women who have not often been prominent in traditional history books. The oldest texts written in Britain are the Bloomberg tablets from London dating from shortly after the invasion. My favourite is the one containing the timeless advice to stop looking so scruffy in the forum if the recipient wanted to be taken seriously. The first British text in the book is from a little later around AD 100 and it is of truly historic significance. It may not look like it but this is a party invitation. It's from a young Roman army wife, probably in her late teens or early 20s. Her name is Claudia Severa and she lived somewhere near the Roman military fort of Vindolanda in Northumberland. She sent this card to a close friend who did actually live at Vindolanda where her husband was commanding officer of a Dutch unit, the 9th cohort of Batavians. Right, as a visiting French priest said of King Henry II of England's court in the 12th century, every day is a school day there. So I'm not going to let you go without you doing some work this evening. Your task is to read this invitation. Now, it looks largely indecipherable at first but I promise you it's not. First, the text goes down the left hand side of the card, then down the right, so it's in two columns if you like. Second, if you look closely, there are two different sets of handwriting on the card. The first covers column one and most of column two. The second is confined to just a square at the end of column two that I have boxed in red. The opening is in the blue box. Let's read it. The first two letters, C, L, are clear. That's the abbreviation for Claudia. The next word is her surname. The S is a bit unfamiliar. The E is long and large. The V is small and clear. The R has a very long descender. The A is tilted to the left. That's her name. You just read Severa. Now you have your I in. You can pick out her friend's name, Leppardina, more easily. We've seen L and E before. Then there are a small P, I, D, I, N, which are pretty clear. Then it ends with the same A and E again. Leppardina, which is in the dative case as the postcard is to Leppardina. The red box at the end is even more exciting, I promise. It's the first sentence of the card, final sentence of the card, and it quickens the historian's pulse because Claudia wrote that herself. We're therefore looking at the earliest known woman's writing in Britain. Actually, it's even better than that. It's the first known woman's handwriting from anywhere in the entire Roman world, which is an astonishing coup for Britain, a tiny blob on the edge of the vast Roman Empire. Claudia's writing is a little trickier, that's than her scribes, but you can still make it out if you stare at it for long enough. I've done the two clearest words for you. Vale, farewell, and anima, soul. While we're on letters, another of my favourite documents in the book is from a woman in Norfolk over 1,300 years after Claudia. Her name was Marjorie Bruse, and she was in love. She came from a well-off family, but was one of four sisters, and at the time of the letter, she was profoundly anxious about her beloved's fairly grasping father's dissatisfaction with the size of her dowry. Marjorie was not going to leave the affairs of her heart to fate, so she wrote to her lover, asking for his news as she'd not heard from him for a while, and was ill in body and heart, from worrying that their plans may be coming unstuck. She eloquently expressed the depth of her love, and prayed fervently that all was still well. It's a tender, candid letter, which she begs he show to no one. For us, it's a genuinely rare insight into the most personal aspects of life in the late Middle Ages. However, what makes the letter of historic significance is the date, mid-February, and the opening salutation, quote, right reverend and worshipful and my white, my right well-beloved Valentine, unquote. This is the first known Valentine's letter. The idea of Valentine's Day had started around a hundred years earlier in the circle of London poets, Chaucer, John Gower, and Otten of grandson. The first reference might actually be in Chaucer, who refers to the 14th of February as the day when lovers choose their mates. So, good pub quiz trivia, Valentine's Day is now pretty much a global event, but it started in late medieval England, and Marjorie is the first known sender of a Valentine's letter. So, we do have some romance as a nation. Until recent times, religion has been central and is a part of life in Britain. It may not feel like it now, but in the past, various British religious groups have been very serious about their religions, Druids, Catholics, Protestants, Puritans, the Church of England. The Victorians like to think of themselves as calm and rational, but in many ages, the nation has been passionate about faith. We've already seen the vast Bibles from Northumberland. Another thing the Anglo-Saxons did was translate parts of the Bible into English, long before the Protestants of the Reformation claimed to be doing it for the first time. The Lindisfarne Gospels were produced around AD 700, but between AD 950 and 960, a priest named Aldrid from near Durham poured over them and added a translation into English, Old English, in red under the Latin text. And you can see it there on the slide. Not long after, the Gospels, four Gospels, were circulating in West Saxon dialect of Old English. Eight copies of that survive. It's known as the Wessex Gospels, and this one is fascinating for showing its owners. D16 Gradus is a press mark from Christchurch Abbey in Canterbury. Thomas Cantuarien, also at the top, Cantuariensis, is Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, who presided over Henry VIII's split from Rome and divorce and wrote the Book of Common Prayer. And John Lumley at the bottom was a Catholic nobleman, manuscript and book collector in the reign of Elizabeth I. He spent some time in prison for his role in the Redulfi plot to put Mary Queen of Scots onto the throne. This thirst of the Wessex Gospels was maybe copied during the Civil War that raged for 19 years from 1135 when Stephen usurped the English throne from the Empress Matilda, William the Conqueror's granddaughter. And by this time, Old English had given way to Middle English, as we can see from the entry in the Peterborough E version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that speaks of the devastation this period had and ends with the mounting, haunting lines, and they said openly that Christ and his saints slept. You can see here some letters that we no longer use. We've already come across the long S. There is also a sign that looks like a seven, which is a glyph of old Roman shorthand known as the Tyronian et, and it just means and. It has appeared in a number of the documents we've seen so far. The others are hangovers from Anglo-Saxon, now just called Old English. To see them in action, though, we're better to look than Beowulf, which is without doubt one of the most important documents in the British Library. In fact, we're lucky to have it at all. This is the world's only copy, and the damage to it that magically took the edges off the manuscript, but not the writing was, once again, the 1731 Ash Burnham House fire. Beowulf is one of the most vivid and compelling pieces of writing in the English language, ever. It's the oldest long poem in Old English and one of the earliest non-Latin poems in Europe. Here you can see the additional old Anglo-Saxon letters, Ash, Win, Thorn and F. So if you look at the opening word, what looks like HP, AE ligature and T, you can see is pronounced quite as the character that resembles a P is actually a Win, a W. The word is an enigmatic explanation, but it's tough to translate. It means what, but in the context of hey or look or listen. Some of the fun of researching a book like this is the characters one meets. As we've been talking about religion, we really should spend a few minutes on the King James Bible. King James himself was an unusual individual. His mother Mary, Queen of Scots, had turned heads in the French court where she spent much of her youth with her beauty, poise and flawless dancing. James, alas, inherited none of her graces. A courteous description of him is among the most devastating accounts of political writing you're ever likely to read. This is not one of the 50 documents quoted in the book, but along with many others, texts that help tell the story, it is included as part of the journey. Quote, his eyes large, ever rolling around his head. His beard was very thin. His tongue too large for his mouth. He never washed his hands, only rubbed his fingers ends slightly with the wet end of a napkin. His legs were very weak. That weakness made him ever leaning on other men's shoulders. His walk was ever circular. His fingers ever in that walk fiddling about his copies. James was interested in many things. He loved debate and wrote books. We've not had many ortho-monics. Alfred, but he was King of Wessex, not England, and Henry VIII are maybe the only other two. James notably wrote books to warn his subjects of the mortal dangers of witches and witchcraft, and then of the perfidy of smoking tobacco. At his accession, James was aware of inheriting a kingdom racked by religious division. Seventy years of the Tudors flicking between Catholicism and Protestantism had gouged deep scars at court and in the country. After initially showing tolerance to the Catholics, James eventually bowed to pressures at court and abandoned the Catholics to second-class status. Then he turned to trying to settle the country's many rifts in the New Church of England, so-called a major theological conference to try to find common ground between the Episcopalian Anglo-Catholics and the Puritans. He sat in on their deliberations and reveled in the debate, merrily interjecting when he felt like it. Memorably, when the Puritan Bishop of Peterborough suggested that baptism could be perfectly valid if performed with sand, James yelled at him, a turd for the argument. Not much productive came from the conference except one enormously important decision to produce a fresh translation of the Bible, as many of the widely used versions gave rise to factional theological disputes over specific words used, like priest versus elder or church versus assembly. Or sometimes, the translations were simply baffling, like the widely used Bishop's Bible command to quote, lay thy bread upon wet faces, unquote, in place of cast thy bread upon the waters. We know the result as the King James Bible of 1611, and it's one of the most famous and widely used Bibles in history. For many believers, its weighty phrases came from heaven, although James personally was not especially close to God, spending his days drinking and debauching lovers, women and men, at court. The translation work for the Bible was undertaken by six companions of scholars, two at each of Oxford, Cambridge and Westminster. Among them were the country's most accomplished linguists and theologians. Not all were saints by any means. My favourite is Richard Dutch Thompson, a gifted philologist, described by a contemporary Puritan as, quote, a dissolute, ebrious, profane, luxurious, deboised, drunken English Dutchman, who seldom went one night to bed sober, unquote. It also turns out that at the same time as working on the King James Bible, Thompson was simultaneously labouring on an addition of the notoriously filthy epigrams of Marshall. And I often wonder what would have happened if he turned up at a meeting of the Bible Committee with the wrong chief of papers. Changing focus, the British Isles have produced prodigious quantities of music from startlingly beautiful medieval sacred polyphony to international chart-topping pop music in more recent times. Two musical scores make it into the book's 50 documents. Both are in the British Library. The first is Summer Is It Coming In. Here it is in all its glory. You still hear it performed as a Jolly Spring song with the melody unchanged from the one that you can see here in very readable notation if you've had any experience and exposure of the medieval noon system, the precursor of modern notation. What is especially wonderful about it is that not only is it, as far as we know, the earliest non-Latin folk song in Europe, it's also the oldest six-part harmony, the oldest canon, and the oldest song to have an ostinato. If you don't know the piece, it really is well worth dialing up and listening to it on YouTube and hearing the sound of Springtime Britain in the mid-1200s. The second is Ralph Vaughan Vaughan Williams' score for the Lark Ascending. The piece makes it into the book because it has a double poignancy. Vaughan Williams scored it for the piano in 1914, then orchestrated it in 1920, once back from the trenches where he'd served as a volunteer stretcher bearer and then artillery officer. The sense of serenity it evokes is plainly a response to the charnel house he lived through in Flanders. But it has a melancholy nostalgia now, as the English countryside Vaughan Williams' country's up has completely disappeared in places, with pesticides having decimated many of the wildflowers and populations of insects and birds, including the skylark that the piece evokes so magically. The riot of spring colors is now in places just green concrete, and the skylark population fell from 1972 to 1996 by 75% with the graceful song-spraying bird now on the red endangered list. We have touched on religion, and there is also the flip side, the profane. Going back to the previous piece of music, the score of Summary is coming in, as you can clearly see a second line of words, Latin ones under the English. This is a religious text to be sung to the same tune, very practically allowing the composition to be used in religious and non-religious settings. The line between the sacred and profane was never far away, as in the medieval Irish poem The Land of Cocaine, a reference to the medieval utopia Cocaine, C-O-C-K-A-I-G-N-E, with its bawdy scenes of nude swimming and amorous frolics between young monks and nuns. The British Library has one of my favorite poems of the period though, The Owl and the Nightingale, written from somewhere between 1189 and 1216, and preserved in the Cotton Collection. It's in the popular genre of a debate poem, like the well-known disputes between water and wine. These poems pit objects, substances, or animals against each other, and have them dispute their characteristics and merits, as if in the divinity schools or the law courts. In this poem, The Nightingale preems, while haranguing the long-suffering owl, accusing it of being malevolent and suspiciously nocturnal, ugly, useless, and having no song worth listening to. The Owl counters that it is sober, rids churches of mice, and is generally useful to humans and God, whereas The Nightingale is a shrill narcissist who merely inspires good, God-fearing country folk to all manner of amorous misbehavior. The Nightingale defends itself fiercely, announcing itself to be proud to be enabler of exuberance and pleasure. Right, that's enough medieval for now. What are some of the other fun things I've found? One of the 50 documents is the report of a police officer looking into Karl Marx's activities. Marx had been living in London for years, but suffered from a weak heart, respiratory problems, neuralgia, liver and gallbladder complaints, rheumatism, headaches, inflamed eyes, and, most unpleasantly for him, outbreaks of feruncles and carbuncles, as he described them right under the place to which Goethe refers. He therefore went on a succession of spa breaks. One year he hoped to visit Germany and decided that the best protection against being arrested on arrival for his previous work as an agitator would be to travel with the protection of a British passport. Sadly for Marx, Sergeant W. Reiner's of the Metropolitan Police was a conservative sort. His report noted tersely, quote, he is the notorious German agitator, the head of the International Society and an advocate of communistic principles. This man has not been loyal to his own king and country, unquote. That final sentence was terminal and Marx's application was denied. However, the discovery I enjoyed most about Marx was that he rarely finished anything. He sat in the old round reading room of the British Museum, the forerunner of the British Library, which I remember working in before the new spacious BL opened in St Pancras. And he remained there day in, day out, wading through oceans of books. He eventually set himself to Das Kapital and gleefully wrote to Engels, whom he corresponded with about everything, including his for uncles and car bunkers. He said, quote, I am so far advanced that I will have finished with the whole economic crap in five weeks. In case you think I'm being sensationist with words, I'm not. And that is a totally literal translation. He goes on, quote, and having done that, I'll complete the economy at home and apply myself to another branch of learning at the museum. It's beginning to bore me. His estimate of five weeks, though, was a little optimistic. Das Kapital appeared 16 years later and sank largely without trace. Another topic that was great to explore and is good to mention tonight in a library talk is typography. As Britain has given the world so many exceptional typefaces, and they are the medium through which many people experience written English. As we've seen, medieval British books were internationally renowned. Once printing was invented, Caxton and Wink in the Word are imported types. But eventually, Britain began to develop its own types. A beautiful early family was those cut for John Fell, Vice Chancellor of Oxford and later Bishop of the City at the University Press, which was established just after the restoration in 1666. The following century, Caslon, saw the extraordinary work of gun engraver William Caslon and writing master and engraver John Baskerville. And then there was the monkish Stanley Morrison's work in the early 20th century for the Monotype Corporation, where he developed versions of some of the most exquisite types in history with the modern hot metal printing, giving us Garamond, Bembo and Polyphilus from Aldous Menucius in late 1400s Venice, Centaur from the 15th century Frenchman Nicholas Jensen, Pierre Simon Fournier's mid-18th century Baroque masterpiece, often called Fournier, Caslon, Baskerville and many others. And finally, his own design, the outstandingly brilliant Times New Roman on the screen now, which the Times newspaper challenged him to come up with after he criticized their existing typeface. Morrison based it on the lovely 16th century Gros Cicero cut by Robert Grandjohn for Christoph Plantin in Antwerp and tweaked it for modern readability. Times New Roman may now seem to be as ubiquitous, bland and vanilla as possible, but actually it's invisibility is what makes it an outstanding design. When you look at it, you see the words that it's printing and not the type with no noise or distraction from busy or distracting lettering. The acres and acres of books in these British types, the original ones and the Stanley Morrison revivals, fill countless miles of the British library's shelves. And since the arrival of home computing, we all now use and see them hundreds of times a day. Turning back again to populations, so far we have met Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and then medieval and early modern Britons. We haven't mentioned Vikings and Normans, but of course, they're also in the mix. The book has some wonderfully pessimistic Viking poetry, and we shouldn't forget that in the 10th century, we had four Danish kings of England, and Old Norse was the language of court, with Viking possessions in Britain being part of a wider North Sea Scandinavian empire. Nor have we mentioned the identities that emerged in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, although the book does. With 950,000 years of prehistory and history, the identities the people who have called the British archipelago of 5000 islands home have been diverse and changed many times. Sometimes it's obvious, for example, after conquest. Other times the changes are less dramatic, but nevertheless material. Today's statue and cultural wars are an excellent example and a manifestation of how identity is subtly changing again. To give some context, on the 24th of January 1965, Winston Churchill's body was drawn on a gun carriage through the streets of London. Coverage in the times was affectionate and deferential. It wrote of, quote, moving tapestry of history. Everyone it enthused was, quote, bound together by a shared intimacy in personal memories of this great and lovable man. It was as if they were taking their own father to his burial. In more recent times, it's become an annual rite of spring and summer to deface Churchill's statue, question his policies, challenge his imperialism, point to his racist statements like, quote, I hate Indians, they are beastly people with a beastly religion. In 1965, these were not priorities for the million lining the streets to be part of his state funeral or watching the pageant on television. But today, people with different perspectives on how we evaluate history are taking to the streets to challenge and defend a kaleidoscope of views, with their focus coalescing around statues. We all know the main ones that are now flashpoint controversies. Edward Colston and Francis Drake were slavers, Cecil Rhodes and the fallen of the Second Burr War were imperial racists. Robert Baden Powell admired the hit the youth and was homophobic. Genocide, people trafficking, and hate crimes based on racism, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, et cetera, are now matters for the criminal law. Discrimination against protected characteristics is also covered by civil equality laws. People have therefore asked why historical figures whose actions would today land them in court should grace our public spaces as examples of celebrated citizens. Just because someone did something of note does not automatically make them a national treasure forever. On balance, I'm not in favor of removing a vast tonnage of the nation's statues because once we start scrapping dozens, ultimately, most would go as the bar dropped ever lower. Every Greek or Roman statue, every effigy on a tomb in a cathedral. None of these people had the morals and values or operated in the legal framework of early 21st century Britain. But yes, some should go and I'll offer two for thought. I know he's a Hollywood favorite, but why is Richard the Lionheart outside Parliament? In the famous words of a leading Victorian historian, quote, Richard was a bad son, a bad husband, a selfish ruler, and a vicious man. He was no Englishman, unquote. In fact, he despised England and only visited twice. Once to be crowned and the other to spend as short a time as possible in thanking those who'd helped raise his ransom when captured by Duke Leopold of Austria on his way back from the Third Crusade. He thought England a rainy, miserable place and even tried to sell London to raise cash for his endless French wars. He had absolutely zero interest in England. He was also a monster. While on Crusade, he was at one stage in negotiations with Saladin over returning captured Muslim prisoners in exchange for money and the True Cross, which Saladin had seized at the fateful battle of the horns of Hattin. When Saladin stored negotiations, Richard had 3000 Muslim prisoners, many women and children, taken to a hill where Saladin and his men could see them. Richard then had them all beheaded and disemboweled. Even for the 12th century, it was an act of incomprehensible savagery. When we look up at him outside Parliament, what are we saying about the way we want our leaders to run the country, the values we cherish and how we want Parliament to be seen internationally? It is, though, as a statue, a lovely piece of high Victoriana, and I'm sure there's a corner of the British Museum that was made for it. More pressingly, there is another statue outside Parliament that I suggest has no business there. Like Richard, Oliver Cromwell shone as a soldier, battlefield commander, tactician and organiser. His victories against royalist forces in the Civil War were often spectacular in terms of military strategy and delivery. However, he was also a monster. His message to the Irish lets us into his mind and it is a dark place. Quote, you are a part of Antichrist, whose kingdom the scripture so expressly speaks should be laid in blood, yea in the blood of the saints. You have shed great store of that already. And ere it is long, you must all of you have blood to drink, even the dregs of the cup of the fury and the wrath of God, which will be poured out unto you. Unquote. Talk like this is not unfamiliar if you read materials from the Taliban, Al Qaeda or Daesh. And as regards the Irish, Cromwell's words were not an idle boast. His savagery at Drogeda and Wexford have gone down in infamy. As is his comment afterwards that the massacre of captured soldiers and civilians had been quote, a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches. Unquote. By comparison, World War One killed 2% of the British population. The wars of the three kingdoms, the more modern name for the civil wars that Cromwell dominated, killed 3% of England, 6% of Scotland and 15 to 20% of Ireland. Some people see Cromwell as one of the founders of British democracy, but I would challenge that. True, he didn't want the monarch to exercise power, but importantly, he did not want Parliament to have any either. He boarded Parliament up and instead ruled as a dictator with a military junta and unlimited power for himself. He was no democrat in any sense of the word and he was buried in royal regalia. I would be very keen to learn in what way he contributed positively to the political journey of our nation. I think his statue outside Parliament is an insult to many, especially the Irish. I now would be delighted to see it put into the British Museum in a display of homicidal ideological excess. While we're looking at how the image we have of some historical characters differs from the reality, another fascinating document is Queen Elizabeth I's 1588 speech at Tilbury, mustering her troops against the Spanish armada. She appeared on a white charger, clad in ceremonial armour and delivered the famous line, I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman but I have the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too. Unfortunately though, the document recording it is from years later and there's no contemporary record of her ever visiting Tilbury and making such a speech. It's quite probably later propaganda. Rulers of course have always had spin doctors and Elizabeth's had to deal with one of her most serious decisions to remain unmarried and end the royal house of Tudor. They did it by framing her as a secular Virgin Mary, the Virgin Queen, devoted to the salvation of her subjects. Elizabeth did of course have numerous lovers. Robert Dudley and his wife's suspiciously broken neck are well known but the more interesting choice came later when Elizabeth fell for a Catholic Frenchman, Duke Francis of Alonso and Anjou. When he died prematurely, the 50 year old Elizabeth wrote to his mother, Catherine de Medici, who of course had been one of the instigators of the St Bartholomew's Day massacre in Paris that had so traumatized Elizabeth. In her letter to Catherine after Francis's death and the letter is in the British Library collection, Elizabeth confided plainly, quote, I find no consolation except death, which I hope will soon reunite us. Madam, if you were able to see an image of my heart, you would see the portrait of a body without a soul. Unquote. Some texts I came across weren't so much fascinating or amusing as shocking, like this in which the writer expressed an anxiety, quote, to enlist everyone who can speak or write or join in checking this mad wicked folly of women's rights with all its attendant horrors on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety. Women would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of human beings, were she allowed to unsex herself, and where would be the protection which man was supposed to give the weaker sex unquote. The piece is forceful and ugly in its language. However, the real shock comes when the author is unveiled as it was written by Queen Victoria, who ruled three quarters of the globe in a muscular empire whose subjects all ultimately looked to her throne. Another figure whose writings do not conform to our image of the person is Isaac Newton. In the same way that Britain and British identity sometimes seem elusive when it comes to definitions, so does he. Newton gets one of the 50 documents. I could have chosen his great work of physics, the day Principia, but instead I went for his translation of the Emerald Tandrit, a foundational document in the alchemic tradition. We think of Newton as the father of physics, a pioneer in the development of experimental science and one of the architects of the British Enlightenment. This is all true, but he was also a liminal figure at the end of the age of magic. Aside from maths and physics, he was completely obsessed with alchemy and the sacred geometry of buildings like King Solomon's temple. He was convinced that both held keys to understanding the building blocks of creation and he spent much of his life hunting for hidden messages that he was convinced God was sending him personally and secretly via the Bible. In his own mind, he was one of God's chosen prophets, just like those in the Old Testament. Britain can be an enigma at times that we see through a glass darkly and Newton, with all his brilliance, convincingly captures that diffuseness. What the historic survey of the book exposes clearly to me is that down the centuries, Britain has been home to invaders, settlers and residents from all over Europe and the world. In the 1800s, the Times proudly proclaimed, quote, Every civilized people on the face of the earth must be fully aware that this country is the asylum of nations and that it would defend the asylum for the last ounce of its treasure and the last drop of its blood. There is no point whatever on which we are prouder and more resolute, unquote. And a few years later, it returned to the theme, quote, It is part of our identity to be the refuge of nations from our ancient fusion of many races and hospitality to many refugees. We derive both the precedent and the capacity for sympathizing with all the tribes of humanity, unquote. This was the late 1800s, when waves of migrants arrived, notably to escape the unrest in Europe. Karl Marx and his wife and children were just one such family. Later in World War Two, Poles, Czechs, Australians, New Zealanders, Radijans, South Africans and many others came to Britain. Lots of them fought, including as pilots in the long hot summer of 1940 in the Battle of Britain. We were never, in any sense, alone. And then there was the notable post-imperial immigration of the mid 20th century. In terms of identity, at the end of World War Two, Britain was largely a country of white people, with English as the only language spoken at home. However, the 14-year period from 1948 to 1962 saw liberal immigration policies for those living in the British Empire and Commonwealth. Many from those countries, of course, had fought with Britain in both world wars. India alone had provided 3.9 million volunteers to fight for Britain. In 1954, Henry Hopkinson, Conservative Minister for Colonial Affairs under Churchill, stood up in Parliament and set out the government's vision of imperial immigration. Quote, Any British subject from the colonies is free to enter this country at any time, as long as he can produce satisfactory evidence of his British status. That is not something we want to tamper with lightly. In a world in which restrictions on personal movement and immigration have increased, we still take pride in the fact a man can say, civis Britannica sum, I'm a British citizen, whatever his colour may be. And we take pride in the fact that he wants and can come to the mother country. Unquote. It was a classical imperial model, just as Rome had extended citizenship to residents of the whole empire, including Britannia in the edicts of Karakella in AD 212. In Britain, the liberal immigration policies of the 1940s and 50s was followed after the 1992 Maastricht Treaty by the framework for freedom of movement of persons within the EU, opening up the right for British nationals to settle anywhere in the EU and EU nationals to settle anywhere in Britain. In 2016, year of the Brexit referendum, official figures show there were 3.5 million EU migrants in Britain, alongside 5.6 million non-EU migrants, largely from the Commonwealth, together equaling 13.9% of the British population of 65 million. This all has an effect on the mix of heritages in Britain. In the census of 2011, 19.5% of people in England and Wales identified as something other than white British. The most mixed city of all was London, where white British people made up 44.9%, Asian 18%, white other 14.9%, black 13.3%, mixed 5% and other 3.4%. One inescapable conclusion of all these invasions and migrations is that from prehistoric times to the 21st century, Britain has been a country which a great variety of people have called home. There are lots of other texts in the library I'd love to have mentioned, like the sole surviving manuscript of Mallory's Mort Dartha, seeing as Arthur is a figure who's been reinvented as a national hero in an endless variety of ways for over 1300 years. I'd also like to have looked at Thomas Cromwell's murder diaries, as I like to call them, in which he wrote down instructions for who he selected to be judicially murdered, next in the course of his running Henry VIII's kleptocracy. But it's time to start drawing all of this together. Some of you may be about to feel a warm, comforting, radox bath-like sensation. Others will wonder why I'm no longer speaking intelligible English. Viking, north at Sira, south at Sira. Westerly or southwestly, veering northwesterly three to five, becoming variable two to four later. Showers, good. Forty's chromaty fourth Tiangoga, west or southwest two to four, occasionally five at first, except in chromaty. Becoming variable later, showers, good. Occasionally poor later. This is an extract from the Met Office's shipping forecast, broadcast by BBC Radio four times a day, and fondly known to the continuity announcers who languidly intone it as the ships. It is the final document of the book's 50. This daily forecast reminds us that Britain is made up a thousand of islands, and for many who sail between them and further afield, the broadcast contains vital, life-saving information. For countless others, it is a soothing familiar liturgy, a constant in this changing world, a secular hymn to the shores and oceans, and a meditation on Britain's coastal outline and its island history. It opens at Viking, north at Sira and south at Sira, off the Norwegian coast, where you can picture dragon-proud longships massing for a raid on Britain's wealth-stuffed monasteries. Further south at Trafalgar, we encounter the confident Spanish Armada, filling its sails to bring Britain back to the face, and centuries later, in those same waters, Nelson's victory in the Napoleonic Wars. Then north to Fitzroy, the only person's name in the forecast, where we meet the ever-inquiring and eccentric captain of HMS Beagle, who invented meteorological forecasting and the shipping forecast itself. As the list progresses, we realise there's not a patch of water in the forecast that does not evoke some important moment in Britain's history. When the advance copy of Anatomy of a Nation arrived in my letterbox, I excitedly posted a picture of it onto social media. One keen observer, a history teacher, replied, looks like a lovely book, especially when most publishers are going for generic covers these days. I agree. But I wonder, is there really a British identity? My answer is no. There is no single British identity. Rather, down the centuries, there have been a multitude of identities, often coexistent, and they have frequently pulled in differing directions. That really is what the book explores. The result, as seen in a narrowness of the vote in the Brexit referendum, is a confused sense of our past and future. Is it obvious, therefore, what the solution is? To me, partially yes. We're stuck in a simplistic and now very outdated feedback loop of thinking of Britain as benignly imperial of World War II, Churchill, and the Dunkirk spirit. The problem with this conception of Britain is that, firstly, much of it is romanticised, selective, and often plain wrong. And secondly, it fixates us on a very small period of our history in the 1800s and early 1900s. Also, it's very earnest. One of the wonderful things about Britain is not its stoicism, but its anarchic humour. Shortly before the Brexit referendum, the German newspaper DEVELT ran a final spoof issue of the British World War I, bitingly and zanily humorous trench newspaper, The Wiper's Times. And in this 21st century revival, which they called the Fritz Times, the German journalists pleaded with Britain not to deprive Europe of Britain's unique and scurrilous sense of fun. Quote, life without British humour, it lamented, is possible, but meaningless. In my view, we will not find our way out of our identity crisis. Brexit, statue wars, classroom battles over what history to teach, or even whether we are comfortable to call the Anglo-Saxons Anglo-Saxon, until we look back across the 950,000 years of these islands human history and realise we are flexible and have been a multitude of peoples and cultures. If we continue to think that Churchill's Britain was the best of us, we trap ourselves with solutions that have little relevance for the problems of the modern world. We need a new identity that understands the challenges, social, environmental and diplomatic that the world is now facing. And to find that identity, we need to look all the way back to the five prehistoric footprints found at Hasbro, the very first Britons from nearly one million years ago, and examine our whole island story from then to now. Be aware of the identities we have had and invent ourselves anew once more. And we can take some or all of these 50 documents and their stories for our inspiration. Doing that, if we can find our next identity, then the forecast for Britain will be the British Isles, variable 1 to 12, rain at times, mainly sunny, good, becoming excellent later. Thank you very much for listening. I'm very happy now to answer any questions. Hi. That was amazing. We do have a couple of questions that have come through, but if anyone wants to drop some more questions in, we've got about 15 minutes where we can answer some of those questions. And by we, I mean Dominic. Dominic, you could only choose 50 documents. Which documents ended on the cutting room floor? And what obvious documents are actually not in the book? Oh, great question. A lot is the answer. Effectively, the book divides Britain's history up into 50 chunks, tells each as the story of Britain's history, and then illustrates it with a document to give a voice from that period that brings it to life and explains and puts the document in a bit of context. So as you can imagine, the very first, the very first document actually is some carving on Stonehenge. The first written text is Caesar. But as you go through the 50, of course, with the advent of printing, with more and more media out there, there's more and more, more documentation as you go further on. So for the early period, it was quite, it was quite straightforward to select some of the simplest, most obvious texts. But by the time we're really getting into 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th century, I mean, you could have chosen anything. And I had a huge number of ideas that didn't make it. I suppose the one most really glaring exception, and it's a purposeful choice, is Shakespeare. Because there are probably more books written about Shakespeare than any other English writer. And I didn't feel it was necessary to include him again. He obviously is mentioned because that marvellous late 16th, early 17th century English of Shakespeare and the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer is for many people, the golden era of English. So Shakespeare gets to mention, but I'm happy to say that Shakespeare is not in the book. And I think that's right. Here's another question. From the list of documents, you've also included some paintings and other items that aren't text. Do you have a different definition of documents? What is a document? Yeah, no, also very good. So a document is not just a text. The text is one kind of document. And when I started thinking of items to include, and I thought of carvings on Stonehenge or paintings by Constable or sketches by Brevet Major Chard, who led the defense at the Battle of Raltstrift and so on, I wanted to include this imagery or the Sex Pistols cover, Jamie Reed's cover of famous one of the Queen with the safety pins and the ransom note. But I was rescued by the Oxford English Dictionary, whose definition of document is anything that is depicted, carved, written, engraved, printed, painted, drawn. So it is a wide definition. So I haven't had to stretch it. So I've been able to include in it a number of things which are pictorial. And that's great because it leavens the heavy amount of text and documentation. And, you know, it's lovely to look at some pictures because just as evocatively as writing, they really tell us something about the age and the period. Another question just in, the talk has been heavy on medieval documents. Do they dominate the actual book? I think there is a lot of medieval. But that's because really the periods when one has to be careful in saying this, but the periods when some of the major components of Britain came together took place in the medieval age. And the medieval age is a thousand years. It goes from the fall of Rome, date that when you like, but the late fifth century all the way through pretty much to do the early modern period and the Renaissance. So that's a vast sway of the time. And in that, a very great deal happens. So from the very end, the Roman Empire goes straight into medieval. So the Celts, the Age of Arthur, the incoming Anglo-Saxons, the Picts, the Scots, all the way through pretty much to the Battle of Bosworth and Henry VII. Maybe Henry VII was the last medieval king before we started the Renaissance. A vast amount happened which set Britain on its journey. And those many identities that we talked about, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, those all came in that period, Norman, French, Angevin. So, yes, medieval does have to get a lot of airtime. But it really is not a medieval book. If you look more down the list of documents, you'll see that the 50 are divided in such a way that there is a lot of 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th century. The last 10 chapters are all very much 20th century, very modern menu from the fact duck, the Iraq dodgy dossier. So, yes, there is a lot of medieval, but that's because Britain's history, much of it was forged in the in the furnace and the crucible of medieval Britain. I have a question from Tam. What is your favourite period or event in history and why? And are you likely to say the medieval period? It's really, really difficult, isn't it? Because it is also wonderful. I've got three favourites, I think. Medieval is one of them. It's where I came from originally. My original studies were in medieval history. But the Tudors, I think, are also absolutely fabulous. I mean, they're not. They're dreadful. They're tyrannical and monstrous. And I think it was, you know, an era that gets so much airtime because it was just so dramatic and Britain took such a wrong turn in the violence that the state thought it could exert onto its people. But the Tudors are fascinating, not only themselves, but also because they're that transition between the medieval world and the modern world. And then the 20th century, I'm also a massive fan of World War I and World War II. And the histories there of how the modern post-imperial world came into being out of the two world wars, of how we lost all the great empires, the British, the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, the German, the Ottoman. You know, we ended up now with our more fragmented world that we're still trying to make sense of. So I don't think I can give one specific event that is my favourite thing that ever happened in history. But yes, the high Middle Ages, I would say, so probably from about 100 to 1200 Tudors and then under the two world wars. You've just mentioned a fragmented world, but does your book say anything about how divided Britain is at the moment, for example, Britain? Yes, it does. Because we're talking about British identity. And I started thinking about the book while listening to the Brexit referendum speeches on both sides. And it occurred to me that what I was really listening to wasn't exclusively arguments and discussions and thoughts about our future. They were discussions about our past. How do we see ourselves? Are we this free-trading Victorian imperial nation? And that's, you know, that's who we are. And so that's who we need to be. Or does it go back further? Do we have European roots? Are we a Western, humanist, European country? And so I was fascinated by these two views we have of our identity. And, you know, neither of them are marginal. The vote was basically 50-50. So these are two very strong, but very different senses of who we are. So yes, the book does deal with the fractures. Because we see those particularly alluded a little to the statue wars and the classroom wars and how we talk about what curriculums we teach. What history do we now, what history should we now be looking at? And many of the curriculums have been ripped up and looked at afresh. And we're including women's history, we're including history of empire, including history of slavery. We're looking at lots of things which weren't traditionally in the curriculum. But that again brings fractures and dissent. And almost any day of the week you can turn on the radio and listen to politicians and commentators getting quite angry on both sides about what we should be thinking about these things. The recent party conference season, you know, there was talked by the main parties of reclaiming our history. This has now become an important political element in the general discourse. And so yes, the fractures are mentioned in terms of all of those things which we are seeing now get people out on the streets, whether it's statues, whether it's slavery, whether it's what's being taught in the classroom. That really is the wrapper in the book, in the introduction, the conclusion, which poses the question, so who are we and where do we come from? And then the book takes you through all of that. And in the conclusion, we say pretty much, well, you know, we do see there is this very long history, maybe we should think a little beyond just our imperial history and think of other things that we've been. We've been a Scandinavian nation. We've been a very French facing nation. We've been part of the Roman Empire. You know, we've been a great number of things. So we can draw on many different structures to think about who we want to be next. So yes, I think fracture is at the center of the book. But also as you go through the different periods, this has happened in other times in other places, after some of the invasions, after the Anglo-Saxons and the Celts, assimilation, a certain degree of people moving exile into Wales or into Brittany, you think then of the Vikings, displacement of peoples, multiple cultures in Britain with the Anglo-Saxon Britain and Viking Britain in the Dane Law, the Norman invasion, of course, beloved of Hollywood, the Anglo-Saxons, now the underclass, the Normans ruling everything. So yes, we are at a moment where Britain is quite fractured, but we also have been there before and we do come out of it. Martha's got a question for you. Do you think that a stronger sense of identity will help bridge our differences as a society? I do, and I think it's hard to think what else will, because unless there's something we can coalesce around, and nobody's going to coalesce around, you know, one or two political policies at the moment, unless there's something really fundamental about who we think we are and who we think the nation is and what the nation stands for, then I think it's endlessly fated to veer from one idea to another idea as different administrations, try to find some sense of direction, but unless there is a course that is drawn from a sense of who we are and where we want to go and governments merely nudge the tiller because we understand who we are as a country. So I do think identity is an important part of how in the next 50 years, because this is not going to happen in one or two years, but in the next couple of generations, Britain reestablishes itself as a post-imperial country and understands its place in the world. And absolutely no doubt, in 100 or 300 or 500 years time, if we look back and somebody gives a talk like this, you know, they will talk about the 21st century as a period in which Britain was X. I think we're just still waiting to discover what that is. I think I'll just take a couple more questions. From Kate, what would you replace Cromwell and Richard Delay and Hart's statues with? Such a good question, isn't it? I suppose as I was saying, if you really want to say that we can't have a statue of anybody who has morals or values conflict with our own, or had a different understanding of what was lawful and what wasn't lawful, then really the whole lot have to go. But that also means you can't really find anyone to replace them with. Most people also have moral flaws of one sort or another, and it will be possible to say of almost anyone, well, you know, this particular view was offensive or abhorrent. So the question really is, do we need statues? And I think they are part of our tradition. And having statues properly labelled, understanding who they are, who they are, getting rid of the worst offenders, probably does make sense, who I would replace them with. I don't think I put modern people up there. I think the nice thing about walking around a British civic space is being immersed in history. But as Mary Beard said recently, you know, most of them are men. So it would be nice to broaden that a little. And possibly the example of the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, having some things rotating doesn't always have to be a statue. We can have public art, we can have nothing, we can have nature, we can have trees. So there's no particular person that I think of who absolutely should replace Cromwell or the Lionheart outside Parliament. There's no one person who one would call the father or mother of Parliament, you know, who created it. I just think we need to think a little bit more carefully about who we're putting in our public spaces and what message that's sending. Our final question is from Kapal. What document that existed but is now missing that you would most like to get sight of? Oh God, that's a really good question. That is a really good question. I saved the hardest of the end. I suppose for the book, one of the really interesting ones would be an original of Julius Caesar's Gallic War because it is the first time we ever hear about British people. And it's really very detailed. Now, as I say, there are all these comments about them being polygamists, about having, you know, strange views, laws, inheritance, economy. The manuscript that we've got in the British Library is the 11th century. There is an older manuscript on the continent. It was a couple of centuries earlier. But really, there is a long time when we don't really know. So was that Caesar's original document or has it been heavily interpolated by people who wanted to bulk it up and pimp it up and make it something that it wasn't? I'd love to see the original, I don't know if that really was what Caesar wrote. That's a nice note to end on. I'd like to thank you very much for joining us. We'll join in Dominic and myself this evening from wherever you are. Dominic, thank you very much for a very, very exciting conversation. We've got an exciting range of events coming up at the British Library. So please keep your eye on our Watson pages so that you can find out more about them on the BL website. You can also see past British Library events on the BL player. And if you do have time, please fill out our feedback form and do remember that you can purchase Dominic's book using the Bookshop tab above. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you very much Dominic. I wish you all a very, very good night. Thank you.