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

And next week, it's 60 years since the Berlin Wall went up. Accordingly, I'm joined by Ian McGregor,

who's the author of a book just out in paperback,

Checkpoint Charlie, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the most dangerous place on earth.

Welcome in. You have to start with. I want to kind of just get a picture for those readers who

don't remember, which there will probably be many now,

of what post-war Germany, immediately post-war Germany in the run-up to the building of what

looked like. Because there's this sort of weird thing, wasn't there, that it was divided in two,

or divided in four technically, but the western side was the three allied powers, the eastern side

was controlled by Russia, and yet Berlin, which was also divided into, was like a hundred miles or so

into the eastern sector. So it was sort of island. How did that come about? It's a very weird

arrangement. Hi, Sam. Thank you for having me on the podcast.

Well, yeah, I mean, it's...

So what you've got from, obviously, May 1945, Hitler's dead.

The Russians have now pushed through a third of Germany towards the West.

They've been met by the Allies on the Elba River, as was

agreed by the Allies at their various conferences that they'd had at Yalta. So everyone

was aware what was going on. But as you said, obviously because the Red Army, the juggernaut of

the Red Army, millions of men and tanks, planes, everything,

supported by the Allies obviously, had pushed through and now captured the city.

They were at least 100 miles further west than Berlin.

But what was agreed quite quickly a few months after VE Day at the Potsdam Conference in July, again with

...