This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures.

This lecture in the series Managing Monsters, given by Marina Warner, was originally broadcast in 1994.

In the cabinet war rooms in Whitehall, London, an austere utility-furnished Warren of basement offices,

where, as the brochure says, everything is absolutely authentic, you can still

see Churchill's high, lumpy, single bed. There's a battery of turquoise, scarlet and cream

baker-light telephones on view, a few skimpy electric bar fires, and many very ample ashtrays.

Strategic maps of the world, of the British Empire, unfurl on the walls,

with lines of coloured wool indicating the position of the armies, red for the British front line,

black for the German, blue for the free French mauve for Vichy. Invasion is the issue,

and this modest basement was the nerve centre of the resistance.

The rooms were opened to the public by the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the spring of 1984,

not long after the victory in the Falklands.

It's a monument to one defining moment of national identity, opened to the public at another.

There, Churchill's rousing calls, broadcast from these rooms in September 1940,

are replayed to the visitor.

Churchill makes his appeal to the British as members of an island race.

But significantly, the evidence of the maps hanging on the walls around

give the lie to the image of the isolated

sceptred isle, the little world all on its own. They make it clear that the nation could only survive

through connection across borders, through the convoys which set out from the ports and

anthropos of the empire, its allies and sympathizers. Here they are marked on the map. Kingston, Jamaica,

Port of Spain, Trinidad, Aruba, Curacao, Bermuda, Puerto Rico, Recife, Halifax, St. John, Sydney,

...