Hello and welcome to the History Extra podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm Ellie Hawthorne.

Today's guest is Heather Jones, Professor in Modern and Contemporary European History at University College London.

Heather's new book, for King and Country Country examines the role that the British monarchy

played during the First World War and explores how the conflict shaped cultural attitudes to the

royal family, both within Britain and across the empire. Heather was joined in conversation by BBC

History Revealed staff writer Emma Slatterley Williams. At the start of your book,

you comment on how other biographies and work on George V and the British monarchy

during the early 20th century have often bypassed the First World War. Why do you think this is?

I think that a lot of the biographies of monarchs tend to try and cover a very

large time span and move from their birth right through to their death. And I think the First World War

is such a specialist area and there's been so much new research that a lot of biographers tended to

try to skirt through it quite quickly. The other thing was that actually in the post-war period,

what the monarchy had been doing during the war,

it really began to be forgotten.

The focus was very much on how the monarchy commemorated the war

rather than on its actual wartime work.

So I think for biographers, there was a tendency

maybe not to see the magnitude of what they'd done.

And one of the other things was that some biographers who did cover the war, you know, in quite

detailed chapters, I'm thinking of Harold Nicholson, for example. They tended to really focus

on the political. And the actual sort of the charitable war work and the welfare

war work, it tended to get less attention because that was what people, maybe in the 1950s

...