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Actong Actong, welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me Al Murray and James Holland

and James, we are joined, we're joined by a stellar guest I think it's fair to say

You got your little black book out and the black book has delivered

Who are we talking to today?

Well, we're talking to, without doubt, the best selling number one historian of the

Second World War in the world today is sell more books than anyone else by a country

mile and in more countries than anyone else by a country mile as well.

And he was the man who absolutely totally changed the game of narrative history of the

war when his book, Starling Grad, came out in 1998, 1998.

It is of course, Sir Anthony Beaver and Anthony, thank you for joining us and brilliant

to have you on the podcast at long last.

Well James, yes, you were quite right to say.

We go back.

Our friendship goes back quite a long way indeed, it's certainly over 20 years.

And well I mean actually a hell of a lot goes back over 20 years.

I mean in fact I started the whole thing back in, really it was 1994 and I think the first

meeting on the subject was actually in 1993 because I came up with this idea for a book

which actually was going to go on from my previous book which was called Inside the British

Army which has a social study.

And I was interested in the way that, hello, of 70 things were changing, not just in

this country but in the world, the way that we saw the invention of the internet, Big

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