Neil Atkinson, joined by Martin Fitzgerald, to talk about his book, The Umbrella Man and other stories.

What we talk about when we talk about the JFK, assassination.

It is out on bite-back publishing, so you can check it all that with them. Martin has a link tree on his Instagram, but we'll also be mentioning it on the Anfield Rapp as well, and sharing all of that so you can get stuck into it. So there is a famous, insofar as anyone is famous in this field,

historiographer called Hayden White.

He is an American who wrote a piece of historiography called Meta History,

which was about the historical imagination in 19th century Europe, Martin.

It's a very good piece of work, and Hayden White produced a lot, a couple of really interesting pieces of work on the idea of what the historian actually is and how the historian

operates.

And Hayden did a fair bit of this work.

He ended up sort of becoming someone who was very, very much taken with

the idea of how genre and narrative impacts the way in which we view history and how history

ends up telling itself as stories. So for instance, he did a piece called The Content of the Form,

narrative discourse and historical representation. I'm going all in here. You're going to be

all right in the end, listeners, trust me and come with me. And as I said, there's meta history,

the historical imagination in 19th century Europe. And he argued that most pieces of writing can be

described as romances or satires, comedies or tragedies. And what I think is fascinating reading

all of the umbrella man from start to finish

is that as a piece of history, and it is a piece of history, it is a historical work, it is

remarkably romantic. It's romantic about memory. It's romantic about Dallas. It's romantic about

being a nerd. It is romantic about Dallas. It's romantic about being a nerd.

It is romantic about storytelling in and of itself.

It's an act of love in a number of ways, I would argue.

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