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

My guest this week is Simon Jenkins, whose new book is The Celts A Skeptical History.

Now, Simon, you announce pretty much in paragraph one of this book about

the Celts that you're writing a book about something that doesn't actually exist. If the

Celts never existed, why are they a thing? How did they come to be a myth? Well, it's a good question.

The word means foreigner or something like that in Greek, and is used by Herodotus, but anybody who wasn't a Greek.

And since then, it really decayed and wasn't used much.

It was revived in the late 17th, 18th century by linguists who were noticing that some languages had much in common,

although they weren't the same.

And out of that concept of a Celtic language emerged the theory that if there's a language,

there must be a people, and this people must have existed once.

And I think called Kelto Mania occurred at the end of the 18th century into the 19th century,

when everybody went berserk, that before the Romans, before the Greeks,

there was this great civilisation in Europe called the Celts.

And although for the past 30, 40, 50 years, academics have debunked this concept, starting

with J.R. Tolkien, rather interestingly, it just will not go away.

The British Museum recently held yet another exhibition on the Celts,

which was complete rubbish from start to finish, including the catalogue. I mean, the odd nod in

the direction of poor Barry Cunliff, who is the professor of Celtic studies, and wishes the word

had never been invented. But the answer is that they were an invention of the modern age,

largely people who are Anglo-Saxons,

who also never existed, but that's a separate conversation, in a sense to explain why people

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