Hi, everyone and welcome to this latest episode of our Brexit and beyond podcast from the UK in a changing era.

But I'm absolutely delighted that our guest this week is Robert Toombs, who's emeritus professor of French history at the University of Cambridge. Welcome, Robert.

Well, thanks very much for asking me, head end.

There are loads of things I want to talk to you about, and I hope that we get some time to talk about history towards the end of this, Robert.

But we're going to start with your book, which I have sitting here, which is of no use to anyone listening, but I am now

waving your book about. And I can say first and foremost, I recommend it because it's not your

bog standard Brexit book, because it manages to surprise you, which so much literature on Brexit

doesn't do. And let me start at the beginning. And you start with this wonderful phrase that I want

to dig into a little bit,

that geography comes before history. And it seems to me that that sort of, that theme goes through this book.

And could you just elucidate a little bit what you mean by that?

Yeah, well, it's a rather enigmatic and obvious phrase.

I think I was thinking of, you know, the famous French 19th century lecture, which is

attributed to a number of people who start off by saying, L'Angleteux Messieurs etunille,

England's gentleman is an island, as if that explains its whole history. And it just, you know,

it sort of occurred to me partly that if you're brought up living on an island, there's a, there's experience of living in a continent that you can never really grasp.

You know, living on an island, if you've been brought up on an island, it seems normal.

It just seems that that's how it is.

But, and therefore it's, I think, rather hard for us, certainly hard for me, really to feel I grasp what it's like living in the middle of a

continent when you're surrounded by other nations, all part of the same landmass. And I often

think of a quotation in a book by Norman Stone, the late Norman Stone, and whether you knew him.

And he quotes someone who was brought up in Poland in the interwar period, who says

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