Hello and welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk, the second world war podcast with

me James Holland and also Almari, although I've left our back in England completing his

latest tour while I am recording this in Washington, DC and across the Herring Pond. Because

I'm on a research trip and lots of people say to me, or ask me, how do you go about doing a

book? So we thought it might be interesting for people to, for me to kind of explain a little

bit about what I do and how I go about putting a book together. So there's kind of two phases

to it really and the first phase is the research bit and obviously when I'm starting a new subject,

I've got a base knowledge, you know, I know a fair amount about it but what I don't know is

the, you know, the kind of detail that gets me to a position where I can actually write a book.

And that requires an awful lot of research and requires a lot of going to archives, walking

the ground, talking to people as well, although actually that is, you know, talking to people

who are there is obviously rarer than it used to be. I mean, I used to do an awful lot.

I've had hundreds of interviews with second world war veterans but obviously they're very, very old now.

Those that still alive, you know, their memory is often not great, although some can still be

absolutely remarkable. And so it's much more about kind of finding these voices elsewhere from

archives and, you know, collections of oral histories and memoirs, published and unpublished

and all sorts and getting those voices is really difficult because it can be really difficult

because I always like to do these books in the round and also I have a different approach to

a lot of other historians. You know, if you read a lot of the big, really successful narrative

historians like, I don't know, Max Hastings or Rick Atkinson, Anthony Beaver College, I say,

these kind of people, you know, what they do is they have lots and lots and lots of voices,

but they're only ever one line. It might be a, you know, a line from a letter, a line from a diary.

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