Hello and welcome to the special Christmas Books of the Year edition of the Battleground podcast with me Saul David and Patrick Bishop.

Today we're joined by James our

producer who's over from Holland for the Gollhanger Christmas party which

we're all planning to visit later on. We also have with us Richard Foreman

publisher and writer who you'll remember spoke this time last year Jesse

Charles prize-winning historian and Roger Morehouse who you'll all know as the more than capable co-host of the podcast when one of us isn't available.

Okay, Patrick, you first. What did you enjoy reading?

Well, I'd be completely honest, I didn't actually read a huge amount of non-work-related books this year, but two that caught my eye, two did catch my eye.

And I just mentioned the first one here.

That's the Red Hotel by Alan Phillips, who, full disclosure,

he's an old colleague of mine, an old mate of mine.

If I had lunch with him the other day.

But he's written a superb book about the antics of the foreign press corps who were holed up in the

Metropole Hotel in Moscow in the early 1940s. So there was a sort of policy that after

Russia joined the war on our side, was rather forced into the war on our side by the fact that

they'd been invaded by the Nazis, there was a kind of information policy

on the British side to get some correspondence over there to tell the good news about the Russian

war. So these hacks were all sort of sent off there, expecting to be allowed to roam the front

lines and send back stories of the heroics of the Red Army, only to find that actually

they couldn't move out of the place,

instead of which they were just plied with vodka and Georgian champagne and caviar,

and also interpreters who doubled as sort of female companions in all senses.

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