Hello and welcome to Trigonometry I'm Francis Foster I'm

Constantine Kissin and this is the show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

Our fantastic guest today is an archaeologist historian former journalist, TV presenter and all sorts of troublemaker.

Neil Oliver, welcome to Chigononmetry.

Well, thanks, guys. Thanks very much for making me welcome.

It's good to have you here. I hope that introduction does make you welcome. For anyone who's not familiar

with what you do and kind of just give us a little overview of your life story so far. How are you where

you are? Sure. I'm mostly, I suppose, a TV presenter and author.

I've spent the last 20 years making television documentaries of various sorts, famous lists of this is called Coast, which did what it sounds like.

We followed the coastline of Britain and other places. Lots of history, lots of archaeology.

My background is, well I have a degree in archaeology from

Glasgow University about a thousand years ago and I have dodged around ever since.

I retrained for a while as a journalist, I worked in weekly papers, did some stuff on the national press as well.

But about 20 years ago, I accidentally got into television and I've been trying my best to get away with that ever since and here we are today.

Fantastic and so you've got a passion for history now and I think what we're seeing right now is a world going

slowly tonto can you see patterns in history being repeated now absolutely I'm

I'm an archaeologist, but I love history. I call myself an amateur historian or an enthusiast. I just love the stories and the storytelling of it. And part of what I love about it is how accessible it is to anyone. If you can read, if you can read it, you can read history. And for as long as they last, the libraries and bookops are full of history.

And as long as you read widely and make a point of reading things that you don't agree with or like,

as well as things that you do like and agree with, then you can give us a good background in history without any

who's like help. You don't need to go to college or university to get an understanding of the past.

And if you do persevere and you read widely and you read back into as far back as you can go and come forward towards the present, you see patterns without a shadow of a doubt.

And I think that's where a lot of the reassurance comes, the reassurance that I find is available in history and

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