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Hello and welcome to episode four of Empire in our Suez Crisis series with me, Anita Arnden.

And me, William Durhampool. And of course, with Alex von Tundselman, author of Blood and Sand. And Alex has just been taking us through. If it weren't

so Armagedony, it would be like a soap opera. I guess there are so many fascinating vignettes

and characters and things going on off screen,

as with the best kind of soap operas, and you keep dipping in and out of different areas.

And we left you on a cliffhanger.

We left you with Egypt.

NASA now has mobilized his country on a war footing.

The Brits have managed to annoy everybody, especially the Israelis, with whom they were

in cahoots to take control. I'd say they'd join the Egyptians a bit more, probably,

they're bombing them. I mean, that's a given. Including your civilian airport in Cairo,

I'd be a bit pissed off if I was the Egyptians. Yeah. They've annoyed the Americans,

they haven't told them about it. They've annoyed their

own parliamentarians. The Queen is quite annoyed. But also, you've got, you know, the fact that

they're doing things completely wrong. They've annoyed the Israelis because they said they would

bomb and take out the Egyptian Air Force and they've managed to miss them completely. And they've

taken out a civilian Air Force airport instead and bombed runways,

which just have nothing to do with the military planes that they were supposedly targeting.

So, you know, Moshe Dian is calling them bastards, bastards, bastards.

...