Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest today is one of the most widely read and successful historians of his generation.

And Peter Franco Pan's own life reflects the breadth of his historical interests.

He is the son of Croatian nobility.

He was schooled at England's poshist school, Eaton, was one of the

youngest ever professors of history at Oxford, and speaks a host of languages, including Russian,

and he wrote a best-selling book, drawing on a deep knowledge of the links between East and Central

Asia, the Middle East and Europe over two millenn millennia. Now, that book was The Silk

Roads. He followed it up with reflections on the modern-day resurgence of economic, political,

and cultural power in the East, that book, The New Silk Roads. He is an advocate of tearing down

the traditional silos within which Western history

has been organised, silos which have encouraged Western societies to overestimate their own

contribution to the shape of the world today and the trends which will reshape it tomorrow.

As the impact of the coronavirus pandemic reinforced the notion that power and influence

is tilting eastward at an accelerating rate?

Well, Peter Frankapan joins me now.

Welcome to Hard Talk.

You are a professor of global history,

so I want you to bring your historian's eye onto the

longer-term impacts of this coronavirus pandemic. We hear from the scientists, from the politicians,

give me your historians' perspective. Well, it's a fairly predictable thing a historian would say,

but change and widespread disease are nothing new.

...