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, to 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 hold 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,

...