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Find out more at condylprice.com. Hello again, everyone, everyone, and welcome back to the history of England, episode 432A, Europe in the Age of the Sun King, Part 1.

And hello again.

If you are listening in real time, we have not spoken like this for a few months,

because we are back, baby, back to the history of England. If you're not listening in real time,

then just ignore me for a minute. You won't have noticed anything different. But for the rest of you,

thanks for waiting. I had a lovely break. So, we are due to start off with the rest of you, thanks for waiting. I had a lovely break.

So, we are due to start off with the restoration in England and, of course, across the three kingdoms.

But it has both become traditional here when three or more of us are gathered together

to first perform the parrot sketch.

No, not that, to offer you instead a framework into which to put

all this parochial, insular, English and British stuff, and give you a burst of European

history, a short, sharp shock. And so to kick off our restart, I offer you two episodes on

European history.

Now, writing history obviously includes quite a bit of reading and research, as you'd expect,

and in coming to this episode, part of that research involved going back to the dusty rooms where my old scripts are kept. Down in the deepest levels of the shed presided over by the Archangel of Books,

a wizened, crabbed, old archivist. There together we found the leather-bound edition of the last

...