Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1998 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a historian. His subject is war. He's written more than 20 books in just over 20 years from his first, the face of battle, to a recent bestseller, A History of Warfare. Exhaustive research and a strong descriptive

style allow him to recreate the experiences of an ordinary soldier, the men

he calls warriors. Earlier this year he was invited by the BBC to give the wreath lectures.

All this from a man who's never seen action.

I have not been in battle nor near one, nor heard one from afar, he says. But I can give myself waking nightmares

about what it's like to be in war. He is John Keegan. Have you, despite its horrors, John, sometimes wished that you had seen action?

When I was younger, perhaps and more foolish,

as I get older, I think it becomes more more unthinkable and unbearable even in imagination.

But you've talked in the past about, I think in inverted commas rather this being your guilty secret

secret it was not because I think all the people all the cadets you lectured to

at Sandhurst knew you hadn't seen action but guilty is interesting I wonder if you've felt you've been a

lesser person or less able to lecture about it because you haven't seen it?

No, I'm very lucky to be slightly disabled. I'm more disabled now than I used to be and I think it's

Kupofi obviously obvious that I couldn't have been a soldier because I limp and I've

limped since I was 13. So soldiers I think treat me as rather a privileged sort of interlocutor really.

They're prepared to talk to me and perhaps in a way that they wouldn't be to somebody who was

burstingly fit.

Why? I don't quite...

Because they know I'm a historian, they can also see that I couldn't have been what they are.

So in a way I can be a sort of confident I think.

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