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

And this week, my guest is James Hawes, who is a novelist and a scholar of Kafka and a Germanist.

And having written the shortest history of Germany, he's now followed up with remarkable haste with the shortest history of England.

James, welcome.

Now, the shortest history of England, first thing I, well, I think, is what's the virtue of doing something so concise?

What, what to you, appeals in the idea of taking history of which we've got quite a lot and condensing it into 250 odd pages?

Well, I think the key thing is, Sam, to get people to sort of be able to see the whole sweep of it in one.

And I came across something early on that Louis de Bernier wrote in the Financial Times, which I'll just quote if I may.

The English have lost their sense of themselves as an ancient shared culture.

In our school's history is taught in a strangely episodic manner, so students have no continuous historical narrative.

The English don't even know their country geographically.

So I think there's a real need to give you a chance to really sit down really for just an afternoon,

because that's all it'll take, and read through the whole thing, and try to find out how it all actually hangs together, if at all.

In researching it, I mean, I can I say there's an awful lot of history.

You're not by training in English history.

Where do you begin?

Do you sort of, I mean, it certainly shows, and I say this is, you know, an intended

confidence.

Like you've done more than probably I do, which is simply kind of spend lost time on

Wikipedia. Oh yes, absolutely. No, I mean, there's real research there, I must say, and there's

some nice little nuggets, which we might talk about later on, which I'm rather proud of and

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