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Hello and welcome to Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week my guest is the historian Anna Kay, whose new book, The Restless Republic, Britain Without a Crown,

covers, well, that brief period when Britain was without a crown, the interregnum. Anna, welcome.

What attracted you to this funny little blip in our history? Well, I mean, the answer is partly

in your question, because somehow the fact that we had a revolution

and we were a republic for more than in a decade has sort of become a funny little blip in our history.

And it struck me, I suppose, as somebody, I mean, I've worked on this century, quite a lot as historian,

but I'd never worked on that part of it.

And it just felt to me like it was something we've kind of forgotten about. And although, of course, constitution, it was a failure,

as self-evidently, by the fact we still have a monarchy today, it was just an extraordinary

thing to happen. And I was really kind of, I really wanted to learn myself more about

what it was like to live through that. And I suppose it was prompted a bit when we were,

you know, when Brexit and everything was happening and, you know, constitutional or, you know,

big shifts, political shifts were afoot in our world and I was just thinking that feels like quite a big deal,

but it must have been nothing to what it was like to stand in Whitehall in 1649 and watch Charles

the first be executed and then the office of King be abolished and all the other things that came next.

So I guess I just wanted to really get under the skin of what it was like to be alive at that time.

Now, there is that sense in the early section of your book. I mean, I don't know, it sort of almost

makes me think of that with an island eye scene, where it's that, you know, we've had a revolution

by mistake. I mean, they never actually meant to kill the king to start with, did they?

Well, some people, you know, I think probably always had that in their sights.

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