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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor to The Spectator.

And I'm very pleased to welcome as my guest this week, the broadcaster and historian Jonathan Dimbleby. Jonathan's new book is called Barbarossa,

How Hitler Lost the War. Jonathan, welcome. Now, tell me first of all what attracted you

to Barbarossa. I mean, it's rather grim and to a certain extent well-trodden subject as the material for your next book.

It is grim, extraordinarily grim, and it's been well-trodden by some very good historians over the years.

I don't think that its significance has been fully appreciated.

And I came to get a far better sense of that out of earlier books that I had been writing.

Because I started by writing about the events leading up to the Battle of El Alamein.

And I went on to write about the battle at sea in the Atlantic.

And when I started doing that, I kept finding myself going to the Soviet Union

and the relationships between the Western Allies and Stalin.

And the more I looked at that, the more I became extraordinarily curious about this massive operation,

the hugest in history, its significance, what it was like, what it meant. And so I started

to read extensively around that. And then I started to sense that it was extraordinarily

...