My guest is James Morrison.

James Morrison.

James Morrison is a former chief of staff of Cathy Ashton, the High Representative of Foreign Policy in the European Union, and he was also chief of staff of the last European Commissioner, Julian King.

He is currently a senior diplomat in the European Commission and the author of a brand new book, 20 cars that

defined the 20th century, The Automobile as a Vehicle for History. Welcome to the podcast, James.

Thanks, Paul. Right. So the first thing's first. This is not maybe an obvious thing to write about.

So what was the genesis of you're writing this book about cars and history. Okay, well, I mean a lot of people

write books about what they've done, but I decided write books about what I was interested in,

which is not to say what I've done wasn't interesting, it was, but I've always had two big

interests, I think, in my life. And from a very, very young age, I was always obsessed

with cars, whilst other people were obsessed with footballers. I was much more interested in the

sort of exotica that they were driving. And I always like history. And both things are very useful

if you end up in a career in diplomacy. Cars are interesting,

of course, because everybody's got an embassy car and you've got to go around the place. But

history is particularly useful because it helps you understand the backstory of things.

Now, a lot of people say, oh, well, then you can avoid, you can avoid, you know, repeating the mistakes of history.

I'm not sure that always holds true, but understanding the origins of a problem can really help you.

And lots of problems and lots of issues that are around today and big diplomatic challenges,

they have a very long history and so you need to know that if you're going to stand any chance

of actually influencing events and resolving what are historically very difficult issues. And how did you go about choosing these 20 cars?

Did they kind of, they kind of choose themselves, even thinking about it for a while,

or did you have to do quite a bit of research to finally make this, that selection of 20 cars?

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