 i'ch trwy'r cyfeirio i'r sprwp yma'r ddadig. Mae'r ddechrau, ganonwch, yn ystod o'r gwaith yr cynnologau, sy'n mynd i'ch cwaith o'r adegau ar y dyna'r dynistau ar y dyna. Ond, y First of All, wrth gwrs dr Gus Cacely Hayford. Gus efallai'r cyfwyr cywethaf, cyfwyr hysdoriadol, cyfwyr drosbwyntau ac lechwyr. Rwy'n tyd i'r ysgolwch yn ysgolwch, ac yn bwysig hefyd, director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington DC. He was appointed an officer of the Order of British Empire in June 2018 for his services to arts and culture. A regular filmmaker and broadcaster, Gus has presented an award-winning South Bank show on African Art, produced the documentary on channel four, about Chris O'Philly, and presented several series on BBC about African culture, ac yn ymlaen nhw'n unrhyw o'r progrwm mewn gwahanol yma dyma i'ch ei wneud yn ymweld ond ymlaen i Llyfrgellafol Africa a'r llwyfrgell, ysgolion fynd yn ystod. Simon Seabag Montepiore yw pwysigau a llwyfrgelliaeth ymlaen i'r hynny i'r hystry i'r llwyfrgelliaeth, ac ysgolio'r llwyfrgellau yn 48 llwyfrgellau. Yn ymweld o'r cerddau'r llyfrgellau ymlaen, Stalin, ymgrifetau rhwng, Jerusalem, ymweldol, Young Stalin, Catherine the Great, oh my gosh, and I'm not going to be able to pronounce this name. Doesn't matter how you pronounce it. Potemkin. Potemkin. Catherine the Great and Potemkin, thank you. The Romanovs and Voices of History, as well as the Moscow Trilogy of Nobles, The Royal Rabbits of London and For Children. He's won prizes for both history and fiction and he's here today to speak about his latest book, The World of Family History. Gus, Simon, over to you. Thank you so much. Can I just begin by saying thank you to Rebecca and the whole his fest team and everyone at the British Library who have hosted us today and tomorrow. I mean it's just what a fantastic event. I mean a great programme but also just the way in which you put this together and the greeting, just the quality of the sessions. It's absolutely glorious to be here and I am so delighted. I'm a bit of a kind of a fanboy and you can see that I've tried to kind of cut my hair in the same and that this is the only man with a name with more syllables than mine so I'm absolutely delighted to meet you Simon and congratulations. What? What? Well I must say that it's such a it's so nice and I also I mean obviously I have modelled my whole look on you and the hairdos are essential which I'm very proud of but also I also just want to thank you Rebecca because this is a I try and do a festival myself it's incredibly hard and this has such an impressive list of speakers not including us but certainly not including me but amazing people and so congratulations and thanks for having me and thanks for coming everybody. Yes thank you so much so the trumps the royal family succession game of thrones and the kind of the frame the paradigm family it's it's everywhere and it's such an effective way of talking about so many subtle and complex things and Simon you've grabbed it as as as a paradigm and you've helped us to use it as a way of navigating some of the kinds of huge areas of history some of the sorts of things that are subtle introducing me to lots of new things and this is an incredible incredible book how did you go about constructing something of this level of complexity? Well first of all you know that you're thank you I mean first of all the family concept is just is simple it's just that I mean obviously it's the essential unit of human of human life and probably always will be it's also a political unit a social unit I'm a political contrivance it's many things it can be a state it can be it can be just a mother and a father and and I just use it as a tether exactly as you describe as a harness to to anchor the great and to harness the great movements of history but also the great challenge of the book like this is to tell a world history that combines the sort of span of global history with the intimacy the grit the juice of of ordinary human life and so many world histories have lots of commodities and pandemics and technical achievements and don't really miss out the humans which we who are so fascinating and of course the humans also do have some influence to themselves on what's happening so that was the concept but doing it um as you know yourself when you write one of these books you know you write a sort of a one line um proposal that says I'd like to write a world history and if you're lucky sometimes a publisher says okay do it commissioned and then about sort of six months later they say you know what's the idea and you don't you know you have to write the damn thing and so that's the great challenge so you're absolutely right to say that it was it was a sort of crushing um uh test really to write it most it's definitely the most challenging thing I've ever tried to do and it did almost kill me writing it I mean there was barely I mean I was barely a night went past when I could actually sleep without waking up worrying about something I mean there was the there was the terrible night I woke up it through in the morning and and said to myself oh my god I've left out Jesus Christ for example um I was so keen to put other things in that you know or do you don't explain another night I woke up and said moatsart you know so so my family life complete was completely destroyed by this book but I ran it along my own bookshelf and I kind of measured up Lord of the Rings Anna Karenhill you know like all of those huge Russian novels about families yes and this this your book is every bit as kind of as as as complex as thick as subtle but also just as long as well I mean the writing the the technical writing of getting up every day and kind of facing into kind of something which was this long how did you well you're right I mean not that I'd ever I mean I love all those books that you've mentioned those masterpieces but actually my approach to it was novelistic in the sense that you know you didn't want one of the things you mustn't do was have say meanwhile all the time that was bad I think there's only one meanwhile in the book another thing you must you know you mustn't do is just have huge sections like a Wikipedia because that would defeat the point up one of the points of it was to have the feeling of contingency of unpredictability that you have in real life the feeling that there are many many crises and things going on at the same time and you have no idea which one is going to blow up whether you're Louis the 14th or Genghis Khan or Rishi Sunag you know there are many many world crises happening and it's it's you worry about one and everyone's obsessed with one and then it's another one that blows up you know sedan for example you know this week so so I wanted that feeling I wanted to catch the messiness of life but also it has to has to read has to be dramatic so the idea was to weave it all in it's interwoven and one thing I took great delight in was having very quick almost kind of instant switches from sort of you know Cromwell's from Cromwell's sort of court in London to the court in you know in China or whatever so that's part of it but you're right I mean the actual writing of it was was daunting and I got up every morning at dawn I lived I'm a bit like in the godfather you remember that scene where where the where the the family they go to the mattresses and they basically live in a kind of house just sleeping with their guns beside them waiting to be attacked and they just wait for the war to be over and it was a bit like that I sort of went to the mattresses or or lived in a sort of rather monk like way and my family went to the countryside and I just lived there and I sort of got up at dawn at six o'clock every morning and I just wrote all day and I immersed myself and I read nothing except what was in the book except at night when I I read all the I love reading thrillers I read all the novels of Michael Connelly I don't know if any of you've read that um the Bosch novels absolutely brilliant um so it was very challenging and of course my family are just sick of that they don't want to ever hear the word world again um but the research for something like this where it's because it it's not just it's it's the expected dynasties it's about it's about doctors it's about it's about the sort of people on the ground who are living life right at the kind of on the front lines of things as well as the people who were orchestrating huge sorts of passages of it it's it's fascinating how you change um that's what I try and do I mean obviously some of the families are dynasties and royal dynasties that you've heard of and they're very familiar with um I mean one of my one of my early kind of one of the reasons I chose family was first of all because there were women in it which you might discuss later women are so much are so important in family and female history is so interesting and so neglected but also um but also because of diversity and the wish the wish the wish to treat every part of the world equally really equally so in this book I mean there is Europe of course Europe is hugely important um but also I mean I think there's more I think it's more diverse than any world history written before um and you know there's more of Africa more of Asia more of South South America um so that that was also part of it um and the great thing about family is I wanted when I when I looked at royal dynasties I literally wanted to treat the royal family of of the Assanti or the um or the Benin or the Gaza empire and Mozambique I wanted to treat those people exactly as I would treat um Frederick the Great or Catherine the Great or or Elizabeth the first and that's that was the sort of basic one of the basic rules of the book and I think that's that adds to it we haven't got your family in there um but almost I mean you are related to some of those aren't some of the dynasties in the book I mean Gus is actually royalty but your family though is fascinating your your interesting family don't we but can you tell me a little bit about your own family because you know just sort of reading a little bit about you and it's just this fascinating story like mine one of migration intercontinental migration of of huge challenge but sort of of overcoming things um I mean my family I mean I actually um my my my sort of father's family is is Moroccan Italian Spanish Portuguese um and my mother's family is is basically from the Russian Empire from Odessa from Lithuania from Poland um so I'm an absolute mongrel um in the best possible sense and but the the Montefuri family is an interesting family because um so Moses Montefuri who was sort of founder of the family fortunes as it were um in the 19th century um was a sort of financier he was brother-in-law with NM Roth the first Roth Lord Roth child the first Roth child and um and he traveled the world as a sort of as a Britain when Britain when being Britain was the most powerful nation empire in the world and he fought anti-Semitism everywhere um so it's an interesting story but you know going back they they were in Spain they were expelled to Spain they went to Portugal um they they pretended to convert to Catholicism um then Philip II hired them to go to govern part of Mexico and then they were denounced as um as secret Jews crypto Jews and most of them were burnt at the stake including um you know the 14-year-old girls and the family the teenage girls and the family and one of them escaped and took the name it took Italy and made it to Italy and took the name Montefuri that that's what we believe is the story so it's a very interesting story and again like yours it's just multi-continental and and in some ways England has been a great blessing for us and was that was that one of the things that inspired you to want to write this because there is something isn't there that set against huge change against struggle that there is something of the way in which family can sort of resist huge amounts of sort of pressure and and and and challenge i think that's right i think families have amazing flexibility and resilience and as your as yours also shows and you know and i think that um that's why family is a great way of doing this because families do change um families families um sort of mutate and evolve in a way and of course into marry i mean one of the themes of the book is that you know all of history is about migration um there are no real nations there are no pure nations there are no pure families and that's one of the themes of the book and all of history is made up of these i mean invasions and migrations invasions are when it's just men with guns and swords and migrations are movements that sometimes include invasions but when the families go to and um and all of them are about these families conquering settling merging pillaging raping um but ultimately settling and merging with peoples and that along with of course empire is another great theme of the of the thing and so so family is a neat way to do that and my own family you know it's it's an interesting thing about britain you know britain um we all know that the british empire um has had has had huge has has committed great crimes like every empire um but britain has also um been an extraordinarily open as well in many ways and so it's like like everything it's a nuanced story i mean montefury was an immigrant from it's a jewish immigrant from italy who ended up knowing queen victoria and united and given a title in his own lifetime he was very kind of he was very quick when he when he met people who were anti- jewish um it was one case when he was having some dinner with a whole lot of dukes and lords and i think it was at the duke of kent's house and you've got to remember this is the early 19th century when he was a jew with a yamel corrodd you know and this was in britain so sort of it just gives you an idea that britain imperial britain was slightly different than we than we than we sometimes think and somebody said somebody said um you know what's what's this what's this jew doing at this dinner and everyone went quiet and he said you know something montefury when i um i've just come back from japan and you know i like japan japan's very different from britain because in japan there are no pigs and there are no jews so everyone went very quiet and moses montefury just said well then you and i should visit japan so they have one of each so and you've been a correspondent you know you've actually kind of been there when some of these the sorts of events the scale of events that you reflect in the book are actually playing themselves out so i mean has that impacted the the narrative and the sorts of stories you chose to do yeah i mean one thing i wanted to do was to bring it right up to date so it ends on the day of the ukrainian invasion yes and um that was a bad day by the way for not just for the ukrainians but also for the writers of world history because i had planned to finish it on the day the first person died of covid in wuhan and it was a terrible moment when i realised i was going to have to rewrite the whole end of the book or add you know but um but but that said i mean i i was very lucky in my i've been very lucky in in my own lifetime i mean i'm i'm 57 i think we're almost the same age yes um i you know i'm very lucky i've known some of the kind of some of the people who can appear in a world history from thatcher to to kissinger to people like that and um and others and you know and i've put them in the book and my own conversations with them in the book and i was also very lucky because when i was after university i'd had a very boring life at boarding school and etc as you do and then the soviet union started to break up and all my life i'd studied russian history and so i just thought like i've got to be there for this this is the great event of our lifetime one of them and so i went out there and um you know there was no way to organise a trip to go to all these places you know i wanted to go not just to moscow and leningrad as it was but also i wanted to go to tbilisi and and yerivan and um samarkand and and bakara and catashkent so i rang up a sort of at the only place i could find out to organise it was to ring up a bed and breakfast company that did trips to the soviet union it was run by some communists and i said to them you know i want to go to all these places they were like oh my god we've never arranged trips to anywhere except then in grad and um moscow but okay we'll do it and so i went on this amazing trip and i stayed with families in every one of these cities and every single city i arrived in a coup broke out within about within about you know 12 hours of my arrival and so i was in this wonderful position of being a sort of as aspiring wall correspondent who you know i got to meet every president i got to meet the warlords the rebels everything i had amazing experiences um and and you know now i look back i was incredibly lucky because you know writing and being a historian but being a historian who wants wants to write a world history there's no better training than to see a great empire falling but were but were you terrified you know seeing these things actually kind of unfold yes in the sense of of but but you continued i was always terrified um i'm not a sort of brave person but that does come over you um a um an addiction to the excitement and also um a feel a feeling that when you're younger that you're untouchable and also just an exhilaration of being in real danger and you know i wasn't real danger i was kind of i mean i had had many adventures um you know i remember there was a great and i remember in georgia for example when i when i went to meet the president um is viad camsacurdia later later assassinated overthrown um he was one of the people who faced a coup as soon as i arrived in his city and um and you know i remember seeing him and i remember talking he was a shakespearean scholar as well as being somewhat insane and um so we talked a lot about shakespeare and then we sort of heard gunfire and that was the beginning of the coup and then i went back to see him and i was he was besieged in his palace in tbilisi in georgia and and there was a great um a great moment when he said like i'm going to have to go and address my followers outside but and i said mr president i i can't help but notice that you have the only phone in tbilisi that works this was this was in um 1991 so it was a long time ago and he had this kind of huge phone this big on his death which was a satellite phone and so i said can i can i phone my mum oh because um because she doesn't know where i am and there's no way to phone out he said sure he said sit in the he said sit in my presidential throne he said using the word throne and he went out and he started shouting at the crowd and they were firing guns and he and i rang my mother and she said where the hell are you i said i'm in georgia she said but there's a civil war going on i said yes i said and i'm i'm besieged with the president um she said get out of there immediately and then she said what's that sound in the background she said it sounds like sounds like hitler and i said well it is the local dictator addressing his um his followers outside so anyway that was a cup but you know i had i had amazing amazing things happen to me i mean if you know a couple of times in in in in georgia and also in chechnia um where i was there for the beginning of that war um really scary things happened where people when you thought you were going to be killed and you get a sort of sick feeling coming over you i mean one of the interesting things about when you know when you read about journalists being killed in wars which i realised from my three experiences of very nearly being killed or thinking i was about to be killed were that the people who were very nearly killed me never really some of them never really found out who i was or never asked they never asked my passport or my name and so i was i that was also somewhat galling um to think that these people hadn't even found out who you were but they were going to kill you kind of because you were there and so that's quite kind of brand i remember thinking like i've got left enough and i haven't written a book i haven't ever had children you know and it's that in a way what your work is about addressing that sense of of frailty that i guess we all have when we look at history and think about how we are flotsam and jetsam at some level and that what writing something particularly substantive as as this piece that it does kind of give us a sense of where we stand of of of something of the meaning of some of the sorts of huge sorts of passages of things that otherwise that seem almost to be you know they're very difficult to deal with you know that thinking about i looked at your your final kind of conclusion and it's a lot of very difficult things but you somehow managed to craft a positive uplifting end to it i think i think all of us sort of are very aware of the transience of life i think it's a feature of of world history that in every age you look at in the book you'll see that people will convince the world was about to end in every of course i think it's probably closer now than it ever has been for and we can perhaps come to that but it is a feature of human nature and i think it's partly because our sense of guilt and fragility in our mastery of the planet almost gives us that feeling so yeah it is part of it and of course you know when i was in those situations in in in grozmi um i did i literally thought my god and one of the things i thought of thinking was like i've been paid 200 quid for this article by and this is the sort of thing you stupid thing you think about i mean pay 200 quid for this article for the for the new york times or new republic or whatever it was and i was writing for some american organs and i remember just thinking like and i'm going to be killed and i'm you know for this and i really must sort of do you know i must do more so that was part of it and i do think i do love i mean but all of power is a study of transience i mean everyone who triumphs who stays on top for for long um isn't on top forever every power every empire every leader um if for nothing else they're destroyed by their own health you know their own aging so that's part of it i mean i love one of my favorite quotations in the book is that of abdel raman abdel rakhman the third um the caliph the first caliph of the umyed alandolus in spain you know who who is supposedly on his deathbed said when i look back at my 60 year reign and it was a triumphant reign he said i can only find 14 days of happiness oh my which is thoughtful but i also think but to really answer your question directly i mean i had on my desk all the time um the letter of sima qian the first century bc um chinese historian who was writing a world history and historians have a special role a sacred role i think um to write the truth and especially since you know i mean i write a lot about russia and in the last couple of weeks i've had messages from osgo about the people who helped me write my starling books you know saying we i've just been raided i've just you know i've been up all night the secret police raided my the ffsp raided my house last night so i did the idea that we're trying to do something sacred and write and sima qian was writing this world history of china um based around china um in china all world histories are based around china of course the central country as they call themselves and and he fell foul of the emperor who arrested him and um gave him the choice um death execution orchestration and he chose castration and um he finished his world history and um he said you know i chose i chose to finish this world history um and to face this terrible mutilation so i could finish the book and so it would be read in many countries and ladies and gentlemen i would have made the same decision had i had i faced that dilemma i would have chosen castration and i also want to reassure you that i finished this book intact and how did you avoid how did you avoid that well as you suggested of not just reflecting a western european a british sensibility and perspective and also the kind you know the power of of european histories and european perspectives on the world it's it's something which is very difficult to resist you know that how did you manage to create a history that felt like it told the story of humanity rather than just of of of euro american of course that's that's the huge challenge yes um i mean one part of it is i think africa for africa for example especially north africa i actually think africa is two continents you know when you deal with it historically i mean the sort of saharan africa which and west africa which have always been since very very early been part of eurasian history and um and so you know i sort of see afro eurasia as really one block um you know not really counting central and southern africa but including very much west africa and especially north africa so that that is natural but it's been hugely neglected traditionally and one of the rules i told you the first rule was about the families which i told you just you know um treat treat the zulu family exactly as you would treat the habsburg yes um a second one is you know never um never um introduce any place any country any kingdom through the eyes of some spaniard turning up first or an englishman turning up and which which happens by the way even in the most progressive history yes you read the most anti anti-imperial modern histories that still happens i did i was i was so every time you meet the inca dynasty um uh you know the dahomians or whatever you will meet them first you know on in their own on their own account and these are sort of details but they matter but writing this in lockdown how did you do that research how did i um i mean and then the other i mean the other part of it is that um is that you know i always i always wanted to write this book i always wanted to write a world history i've always been much more interested in the history of southern africa or or you know asia than i have been in right reading it about britain and the tutors are banned in the book really um so i mean they they course they take they take their place but i mean just to answer your question about before i get to the question about the research yes i mean it's one idea that you know gives you that gives you the idea of the sort of priorities in a book like this i mean in 1415 we all know in britain this is the uh you know of agincor yes um when you look at agincor agincor is it you know which is a key battle in english history we've all we all virtually feel we were there but actually the the the armies at agincor were tiny i mean they were somewhere between five and eight maybe 10 most thousand people in you're just a few years earlier um the you know the battle between the battle between um tamalain and um bayazid the ottoman sultan apple and padisha the armies are as big as 200 000 and so you can see why in my book um you know that that struggle is in them is in the text and you know henry the fifth and and agincor are in are in the footnote um but you know researching it was extremely difficult and you know it's a terrifying feeling that you have to master all these different subjects where i was helped was i didn't really have many researchers i started off with a wonderful one wonderful researcher and then she had a baby which is appropriate for family history of course but then she was not able to help me anymore so i did it but but i've learned from my books really doing it all yourself is the only way to do it wow um because i've got an eye for what i want all these books are really written for what muses me and interests me um but what i did have was i wrote at the end of the book i wrote to the world expert on every subject whatever it was um whether it was ming china or um or you know or or the um or the aztec kingdom or whatever and i wrote to them and i said could you you know i could you um you have to sort of i had to be incredibly flattering i said like and you know i've got your book beside me um which i normally did and um and i said you know please can you read this stuff and of course some of them just say get lost some of them right back it's incredibly rude corrections you know saying you shouldn't really be attempting this this is a terrible this is an outrage and i know the feeling when i get because i get sent books on starlin and the the romanoff dynistin calf and the great all the time and sometimes i'm just outraged by the idiocies of people right and send to me but i've been credibly lucky i'm i'm one of those people who they you have to have a certain sort of um uh you have to have a certain sort of i suppose am all proper to even attempt to book like this i've never minded being corrected by cleverer people and so i've i was credibly fortunate in my life to have wonderful teachers and you know one night my first book kathryn the great of bethemkin um i had an amazing woman called professor to isabel de madriaga a name almost as splendid as ours and she um uh she was a fascinating character and she was she was an expert on kathryn the great and she she really inspired my book because she said there's no biography of the partnership of kathryn and bethemkin and so someone should write it one day when i was when i was doing my uh we're studying the enlightened despotism i read that i thought like i'm going to do that one day so i and i did and so she very strictly told me to to how to write books and um i literally sat at her feet she was incredibly grand woman in her 70s by then she looked exactly like kathryn the great in fact i think she was she thought she was kathryn the great and when i went to see when i went to the when i went to research a book and i went to visit the tomb of bethemkin um which is in hirson in ukraine yes that there hangs a tale if we have time and um when i went to visit she said will you lay um a bouquet of red roses on his tomb and i realised that she really did think she was kathryn the great and she was in love with prince bethemkin um so i did deliver that and of course you know prince bethemkin is a fascinating relevant has a fascinating relevance now because president putain has actually stolen that body and taken it back to russia um which which is pretty fascinating yes we're going to open up in a moment but just the book has some interstitial moments in which you talk about the population at different periods in yes and the exponential the terrifying growth of of populations i mean did i mean did you have kind of particular conclusions that you could draw just from that as a graph that just as a trajectory that is one of the most that is one of the most important things in it and of course that's i mean a lot of that is to do with medicine and you know the i'm a doctor's son and grandson and nephew so i'm fascinated with medicine so the book is filled with medical advances and doctors and as you said at the beginning um this is a book not just about um royal dynasties but dynasties of families of doctors and lawyers and and executioners by the way i just saw that you did you just see that they just found the the the notebook of pierpont the english ex the british executioner who executed about 500 people um in the early part of the 20th century it reminds me of one of my favorite dynasties is um the sanson dynasty that the hereditary executioners of france who first of all used axe and wheel to break people but then but then adapted during the french revolution to of course the guillotine where they were killing hundreds of people a day and one of the executioners um one of the sansons slipped on the blood because he was executing so many people he was exhausted and he slipped on the blood fell off the guillotine hit his head and was killed which just tells you is an occupational hazard you are going to be executing way too many people a day and i'll tell you another occupational hazard which i also love in the book there are many many monarchs who use poison to execute to kill people and which is a very useful poison is very useful it's the family or caught way to kill people because there's always doubt about whether they have or haven't been poisoned um and by bars the founder sultan who was founded the mamluq kingdom in of egypt which is a big part of the book born a slave by the way you know rose to general and then sultan so he literally went from slave to king pretty amazing but he he often poisoned people his guests it's a very neat way to deal with problems but it but an occupational hazard is one day he absentmindedly was about to poison one of his guests when he drank the cup himself and which is very much an occupational hazard if you do poison your guests um but but just i mean just to answer that population medicine is absolutely key to the book um you know the sort of the improvements in medicine and nutrition in the last 150 years obviously changed world history i mean one of the interesting things is that you'll see that in the second part of the 20th century um and really in the whole 20th century famines became much less common yes um they really only they they they really only happened in wartime um or as as a result of direct political decisions or policies as happened in ethiopia and starlin's um starlin's famine in in ukraine and the soviet union um so so that was a hugely important part of the story and you know you you realize that um you know west africa is about i mean the population picture of the world now is about to change radically yes um you know originally it was predicted that nigeria would be the second biggest country in the world and it may not with with almost a billion people within 50 years which is which is terrifying um it should mean that nigeria it just adds to the fact that nigeria is you know well positioned to be a continental if not a superpower yes but obviously it requires great government you know a huge improvement in governance to achieve that and i don't know if that's ever going to happen judging by the latest election yes but but um but there's going to be a huge switch in populations and that's going to make migration again a hugely important challenge which we're really not facing up to yet but that's very much a subject for the conclusion but my last question before we open up um to our audience but also if you're at home please do um send us um a question online and that is that you choose the rolling stone's sympathy for the devil as you say that's the greatest history strong ever written and i just wondered what about bony m rar rar Rasputin that was a very good that well that's your best most important question by far russia's greatest love machine i mean i mean um and earth yeah i mean other than that i mean this is a great great great kind of piece of yeah well well i mean i mean one of the great things about writing about families to get the feeling of life so this book is filled with food and sex and poetry and and love and the things that make family as well and music yes um one of the fun things about the music is that you know some some musicians really were kind of part of part of history and high politics i mean the best example i mean of course elvis is in there and um and uh and um people like that the stones david bowie is in there but of course the most the best example is is is frank sinatra because frank sinatra you know the mafia are in the book and in 1946 he's sung at the mafia conference of lucky luciano mylanski and bugsy seagull in havana of all places and then he became very close to the kennedys and he introduced marillan munro to the kennedy brothers that went well of course then he introduced judith exner who was the lover of sam jinh khan of the mafia boss godfather of chicago and that didn't go that well either but then he managed to because then he was then he was great friends with with ragan ronal ragan and he sung it you know he organized him he's an auguration so there's a world historical figure so when i was listening to the book i listened to all this music wow and um and you know i began to realize that there's a great fun thing looking at these what i call history songs a history song is either a song that is about history like the two you mentioned or um or is is sort of a song that is the sort of theme song of a history moment like the winds have changed the song by the scorpions about the fall of the berlin wall for example so this so i decided i'm going to have the first history book with a soundtrack and so on spotify the world has a soundtrack of the greatest history songs and it's like and i would love you all to listen to it and choose see if i've got if i've missed anything out but it has it's not it can't just be a book about history it also has to be a good song to go into this now i chose the rolling stones partly because um nick jag is always is a great reader of history books and has read all my books oh wow um a bit of name dropping there for you but also because um it is i think a masterpiece because the lyrics are so clever because to pretend you're the devil yes um you know um guess my name um please and and and the words are superb you know please allow me to introduce myself i'm a man of wealth and taste yes and then he goes on to you know drive a tank held a general's rank and he he does all the most terrible crimes you know world war two the killing of the kennedys the killing of the romanoffs and they're all in the book so it was a perfect so i made it then i made it my number one in the um in my playlist my world playlist but rara rasputon is a very important word and rasha's yeah rasha's greatest love machine except i think for temkin was his was rasha's greatest love machine so it contains at least one factual mistake okay and the other was but but by the way on twitter you know how humorless twitter is and the type i've had a lot of people writing me and saying like but this this book this this song is not accurate you know um napolia you know napoleon um did not actually surrender at waterloo and things like that you know about about abbas waterloo and so you know i just explain it's it but it doesn't have to be completely accurate but rara rasputon though it does also contain the line you know lover of the russian queen and i don't think the rasputon ever will actually was lover of our empress alexandria however i do think that rara rasputon is one of the great historical analyses of all time um it's a key historical source and i would also say if anyone wants to understand earlier 20th century court politics at the at the court of the last roman or sar that is an excellent source and an essential material for you to study fantastic well with that we'll can we open it up a question here some fantastic 40 minute songs about the first world war just okay when you were doing your research simon when you're looking at these big families how much did you come across what lives were like for ordinary families who were often ruled by these bigger people and how much did the ordinary and the less ordinary kind of interplay with each other it's a very good question and um it's a very relevant question i mean as i said there are enslaved families in this book who were followed um through through the book um and there were royal families who were the most privileged people on earth um so there is literally high and low in the book but but i should say um there are also many many professions many many ordinary families who for some reason or other we have source material on until we can write about on the other hand i'm a i'm a historian of power and most of my books are about the rulers um and so this isn't a book about ordinary people though it's also i mean when i talked about family at the beginning of this discussion it's a book about ruling families but it's also about family so for example you know there's an enormous amount about how family the family unit of ordinary people has changed throughout history something that is affected by religion working habits economy and of course healthcare massively um and of course cultural more so so there's a lot of ordinary ordinary people in the book in fact and i hope it satisfies you and there's a question that's come in um online was there anything about any of these ruling dynasties that you found particularly surprising yeah i mean i found everything surprising about it there are so many things i learned that i didn't know but what i what i've took what i took great pleasure in most of all was just the importance of women in families and you know in one way this book is really a book in praise of motherhood it's about it's a book about mothers um one of the things i was i'm always you know i we were taught as children in our school and i know this is true of you guys is we were always taught that um hillar and starlin only were monsters because um they were beaten by drunken fathers and um and they were mad and so you know that is a very unusual analysis but you know and it's even more unusual because everyone in the 19th century was beat were beaten by their fathers but what it was what was interesting about it was the mothers and both of them were absolutely worshiped and adored by their by their mothers and when you look at hitler's upbringing when you analyse it i mean the father was yes the father was a bit of a bully but you know he was very much a man of his time but the mother worshiped hitler indulged him adored him he you know so he became hitler from an excess of confidence fostered nourished and nurtured by maternal love so there's a lesson for all parents all mothers out there but you know but but the but the influence of women i mean just give you very quick example this question is a nice question i mean in the early sort of 17th century you know in england all we read about is you know James the first Charles the first Cromwell who are all in the book of course and and very important especially the Cromwells who are fascinated by it but um but you know we sort of feel that england's the centre of the world and this is what's wrong with the traditional history and you know i was fast i was very surprised to find out that it that during the entirety of that period which is about 50 years the most important person in the world was a woman called Cossam Cossam Sultan who was the widow of um sultan the padisha of the ottoman empire the time when the ottoman empire stretched from basically from the borders of morocco all the way to the borders of iran and all of all of it and all of kind of the Balkans as well um and all of iraq massive um massive empire she was actually dominant you know um making her sons um the um the emperor removing sons i mean she had to make some terrible decisions i mean she had to have one of agreed to have her son ibrahim the mad strangled which is a very difficult decision for any parent to make um but but you'll find that in the book why you know in the end she sort of saw sense of making it but the point is you know we live in such a sort of anglo-centric world um and actually and actually this woman was actually the most important person in the world or one of the two or three and we've never heard of her so she's a really important person in the book and that's why it's fun to write a diverse book to write a book that looks at women and social mobility as something that yes because i mean it's natural that we want to see the progress of people that we are close to and related to and but that sits in slight tension with us allowing for a throughput of some of the sorts of people who might be modernized in well that that's exactly right and you'll find in the book um many many people of color who appear in surprising places you know the first general the first black general in europe was was promoted by peter the great yes you know general hannibal yes um the first black general biracial general in western europe was general doomer the grand the father of alexander doomer the um the the writer and hannibal was was and and pushkin was of course a descendant to general hannibal so there are lots of these surprising and interesting characters um in the book and that's one of the great joys but the woman i was talking about kosem was an enslaved woman and that is the fascinating thing when you were talking about you know people not just covering the high peak high people of course you know most of the people enslaved by um crimian tart a rage into russia and ukraine um did not become the ruler of the largest empire in the world and so in some ways we're talking with exceptional people but it is a fascinating thing isn't it that this girl stolen from her family at age six or seven or twelve or something who she never saw again or heard from again they were probably killed during the raid she was taken she was sold as a sex slave um or or whatever or to be whatever from one person to another and then placed in the harim uh and placed in the harim of the emperor the Ottoman emperor and then he notices her he marries her and so one one's reminded how complex these questions these nuanced questions are and how um and how things are a lot more complicated than just say one civilization is good one civilization is bad and i try not to do that i try not to follow any ideology in the book i reject the old sort of imperial ideologies of sort of hero worshiping um pith helmeted imperial heroes but i also reject you know the the new ideology too and you know our job is as historians is to try and get as close as to the truth and to cover everybody victims victims and perpetrators everyone counts or no one counts and do you feel optimistic because a lot of a lot of the sorts of passages of the history that you that you relate to us it are really difficult to deal with and that's it's holding the mirror up to us and making us take responsibility for you know as a as a as a race that we have we haven't necessarily kind of dealt with opportunity well and i just wonder how you feel do you feel optimistic um the future yeah and i think i think you know that that is my mission to show everything um and not to follow any program about how to how to have a hierarchy of victims for example yes um but really to show everybody that i can you know um and to and to and i do believe that of the crimes of the past i mean the best thing is to try the people you know as we did at Nuremberg um you know in their lifetimes um but i do think that that ultimately the best revenge is the best redemption is to shine is to illuminate everything um without without favour without sparing that you know all national pride um but also placing everything in the correct perspective i mean for example you know a lot of the discussion about British Empire all of the every virtually every crime the British Empire committed is by the way is in this book but um the French Empire you know which had no monarchy for much of it um you know was is very is is almost exactly the same in its history and had and conquered an empire is almost the same size and it's really impossible to understand the British Empire without understanding the Dutch or French or Spanish empires too um am i am i um optimistic or pessimistic i mean this book is filled with the most terrible thing yeah as you as you know it's filled with with killings and tortures um wars and one reason just you know very quickly but one reason why wars are so important and this book is filled with violence is because as you've seen in Ukraine you know war is the great super propellant of change and you know things can remain the same for for a long time to paraphrase to paraphrase Lenin you know you know nothing's happens for years and then years happen in weeks you know and so you've seen in Ukraine how that has changed the tilted the world and that's because everything you know new discoveries technical advances ingenuity um you know all systems are tested by wars and crises pandemics so they're very important and the book is filled with them but it's also filled with all the poetry and beautiful writing and art that i could find it's filled with artists in fact it's a great celebration i mean of human kindness and love as well and you know we are in a more dangerous time um than we've ever been for all sorts of reasons do you think every do you think every era that they say that or do you think that there is general there's genuine kind of empirical i think we are i think we are in a more dangerous situation than we've ever been before i mean there's climate change of course um but you know there's also um nuclear weapons and the ingenuity of weaponry now and you know it is a bit like um Chekhov's famous comment about theatre you know he said if you go if you go to a play and there's a gun on the wall um someone's going to get shot during the play and um and that is true with with nuclear with with nuclear weapons so so i do think we are in a time of great danger but i also think um i believe that ingenuity and flexibility um of human of humankind and we should celebrate that this book's a celebration of it and i do think um you know we will come through it it's five or so minutes left is there other questions please so can you wait for the microphone so thank you yeah thank you very much um two questions if i may um the first is how do you decide upon which book you are going to write next and my next part is what's your next book sorry now you put me on the spot um how do i decide on the books i mean with this book i'd always wanted to write it and um and you know i i i sort of my father gave me a world history when i was very little and he said in his rather sort of gentle way he said um you know maybe you'll write something like this one day and i always wanted to because i've always followed um Benjamin Disraeli's dictum he always said Dizzy always said he was a bit of a hero of mine and there's a big character in the book but he always said you know when i want to read a book and i can't find it i write it um which and i followed that israeli dictum you know normally i i try and write a book that hasn't been written before and that i i think i can do um but you know it was a sort of leap of faith of whether i could do you know survive writing this one so i decided to do it because i'd written a book about Jerusalem and Jerusalem my history of Jerusalem Jerusalem the biography is a sort of history of the european eurasian world of the Abrahamic faith so it's a sort of um europe and west asia and um and i loved doing that and so i thought like okay i've done a sort of you know disraeli also said a history of the history of Jerusalem is the history of the world so i thought like maybe i should do the history of the world and and i have and i've survived it to tell you about it which by the way is the fun bit because writing it is terrible it's how but the best bit is talking about it um on stage of charming people and talking going around and i'm going around the world now talking about this book everywhere really and and what and how have you felt the the reaction has been from historians from historians it's been so far so far i mean it's just it's about to come out in america which is which i would you know um i tell you you know you never get over the um you never get over the tarot that the sort of trepidation of reviews and the longing for fairness in people reading books and you know big giving having the generosity to know how hard it is to write but i haven't decided what to do next but i'm going to do a lot of fiction now i mean my next big history book is the big three um which you know the relationship is a sort of triple biography of Churchill Stalin and Roosevelt um but you know who knows where we'll be when i finally write that because i'm now going to do a lot of fiction and dig scripts and people are making films of a lot of my books which is very exciting are you going to um wow yeah we're trying to yes we're trying to we're trying to make a tv series i mean we sold it to um a and e network in um in the states so so we may well do that um and i hope i i love making my tv series and people always said to me you know did you have did you ever write a book about spain or rome or the places that i made these my tv series for the beab about and i never did but all of them have gone into this book and one of the joys of the book is putting in people i've met but putting in all the places i've been to um you know i've been virtually everywhere so and i've stayed in many of the houses or visited many of the houses and palaces that i write about so that's that's a lot of fun so i really hope to say that's a nice question thank you but that was three questions it was it was oh well that's good well i love teachers i love teachers oh but simon thank you so much it's just been such a treat we same hairstyle born in the same year equally long and complex names and family family histories and to talk about yes and i absolutely enjoyed the last hour but also i have absolutely enjoyed the last week which i've dedicated huge amounts to reading this particular book and if you haven't read it please do get out there and buy it and read it it's it is such a wonderful read and when you do finish it you think gosh that is important not just in terms of the brilliance with with it's written but also it leaves you with a sense of of how we need to contribute to making the changes that we would like to see but it's in such a pleasure to to meet you and to speak to simon and huge congratulations an important book but also one which is beautifully beautifully written thank you so much thanks for having me thank you guys