I'm Gaius John Batcher Gymaticus Macavlaeus is here. We're drinking a cup of wine by the Thames, springtime. The shoppers have largely gone home for supper. We're on to our way to sacrifice to Augustus, our great God.

There's trouble along the Danube. There's always trouble along the Danube, but we don't care to talk about it right now. We're going to trouble

along the Rhine. It's the summer of 1932 and I've been reading yet another book about

that time and I began to have this sense that I'm reading a Shakespearean

history.

All the players are in place.

I know what's going to happen.

I know the outcome. I know who will win on the battlefield

McDuff will win McDuff always wins but still it's a fascination to watch the

twisting of the plot. And Germanicus, what I learned from the summer of

32 until the Hitler rights prevail and take over the Reich.

And then soon after the Reichstag Fire they suspend all civil rights and Germany is a dictatorship.

What I learn is that the moments

when history goes wrong are our Legion, they're everywhere. There's no one moment you could say if this had happened

then everything would have been okay. That's what I learned again and again when I read this.

There's a there's a rush towards a bad outcome and there's no one who

can no one can stand in its way and certainly when you read about it 70 years

later you don't even think anymore what is And certainly when you read about it 70 years later,

you don't even think anymore, what if?

You just follow the villains, you follow the heroes,

and then 70 years later you go,

what is happening now that 70 years from now they will see

...