Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's

best selling history magazine.

I'm Ellie Corporn.

For today's podcast, we're bringing you an editor's pick, in which a member of our

team chooses one of their own personal highlights from our back catalogue.

Today's episode was the choice of our content director Dave Musgrove.

Despite being a committed medievalist, Dave has somewhat unexpectedly chosen a conversation

about the post-war world, with the historian Sir Ian Kershaw.

Many years ago, Ian was in fact the very first guest to ever appear on the History Extra

Podcast, and Dave spoke to him again in 2018 for our 500 episode.

That's the conversation you'll hear today.

I'm here with Sir Ian Kershaw, one of the leading historians of Hitler and Nazi Germany.

Your new book, however, Roller Coaster, Europe 1950 to 2017, explores post-war Europe.

You actually started your career as a medievalist historian, so you enjoy a challenge.

Presumably, this small leap forward in time from the Second World War to a post-war period

was much easier than leaping forward 700 years from the medieval period to the Second World War.

Yes, it certainly was, of course, and it's the period of my own lifetime, so some of

the things were in a broad outline anyway, familiar to me.

On the other hand, I'd never done any primary research on the post-war era, so a lot of

it was new to me in any scholarly sense, finding my way around the research materials

and the literature was, opposed its own difficulties, but it was nothing like us,

hard, as you said, as moving, jumping seven centuries from the 13th century

...