Welcome to the British History Podcast.

My name is Jamie and this is episode 246, The Heart Edge of Soft Power.

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the show independent.

I offer members only content, including extra episodes and rough transcripts.

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and thank you very much to Jorge, Jared, and John for signing up already.

When I write an episode, I begin the process by looking at what's happened in the past,

like before the event, not just in the past, obviously I'm looking in the past.

And then I also look at what's going to happen in the future.

And only after I do both of those do I allow myself to focus on what's actually occurring

for this episode.

And I do this because I want to know the context of the events.

The sources that survive don't often give us the why or even the how.

They're all about the what and the when.

And that's not the real meat of history.

If you want to know what people were actually experiencing, you need to know what they had

already gone through and why they were making the decisions that they made.

Now this will become easier as we move forward in time, because we'll eventually have diaries

and personal letters and detailed accounts of political meetings.

But even now, if you look close, you can see a bigger picture.

...