Hello, welcome along to writers' routine.

It's the bonus by The Random Routine.

My name's Dan Simpson. Thank you for finding us. Thank you for listening and following.

This week, it's with Tim Marshall, nonfiction author. He was on the show back in 2018, and he sold millions of books. He had sold millions of books before. In fact, when I recorded with him, I think he just had confirmation that he'd sold his one millionth book, so he'd done that,

and since, I mean, he's sold millions more, I can only imagine.

He was the diplomatic editor of Sky News, traveling all around the world, getting stories,

reporting in the field from Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia as well during the Balkan Wars of the 90s.

That gave him a knack of making sense of geopolitics and just explaining

it fantastically. Not pandering, not patronising, but really casually and incredibly

informatively as well. His book Prisoners of Geography, you're probably known for that. It was a huge success. He followed that up with divided, worth dying for the power of flags, and his newest one is the power of geography.

Now, because of all that, as such, this is about his writer's routine. It is kind of just the routine, but it's probably is a little bit more.

He knows so much about the world. It's hard not to pick his brains and to veer off and digress

here and there. So even in this short snippet, which starts with the routine, we cover Brexit

and India and Trump and Pakistan and Kashmir.

There's a lot going on in just about 10 minutes.

So let's get on to it with Tim Marshall.

And it's just his routine and a little bit more this week.

Well, the routine is often, I get up and I go out for breakfast.

I mean, it's such a luxury to have someone bring you something and then take it away after you've finished it.

Even if you do have to pay for that privilege, it's great.

I just cannot bring myself to make myself coffee, tea and toast in the morning.

Now, obviously, it costs, but I've been fortunate enough recently to sell one or two books,

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