Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a historian, his interests are wide.

He is as much at home among the affluent charms of the 17th century Netherlands

as he is in the bloodthirsty turn of 18th century France.

People and paintings, food and music populate his works

as easily as great events or political movements. He's now brought history to an ever

wider audience as the author and presenter of the BBC

television series A History of Britain. An Oxbridge exile who's found the

freedom he needs teaching and working in America, he still thinks of the great English historians as

patriarchs of the craft. You're not doing your job properly, he believes, unless you've

equipped yourself with the skills to make history work with the broad reading public. He is Simon Sharma.

So Simon, is it the communication of history that drives you as much as the history itself?

Well, I do love the writing, and actually I do think in some of the models, and I revere, going

all the way back to Herodotus. There was a gossipy relish. So there is this element of actually

chatting by the campfire, which I think is wonderful. And I think actually if a historian

only thinks of himself as undertaking a seminar and not spending time

in a company of friends, the thing isn't going to come alive.

And not storytelling, which is what you do.

Storytelling is crucial we are historians are just the

holding the battle of this

tribal storytelling right between our grandparents and our grandchildren

...