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Acting actor, welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me, James Holland, and I am

joined today by Professor Lloyd Clark, incredibly eminent historian. Some of his work I've been

reading for absolutely years. He's the head of the Centre for Army Leadership. He's a visiting

professor of research, fellow at Buckingham University. Anyway, you have many academic posts,

and also prolific writer Lloyd. You've written loads of books, and my shelves are thick with

your uvra, I should say. Likewise, thanks very much, James. But your most recent book is

The Commanders, the leadership journeys of George Pattenburn and Montgomery and Irwin Rommel.

But I thought actually, you know, all the years who've been doing the podcast, I don't know, I've

never talked in any kind of depth, I don't think, about Rommel. Not that I can remember. So,

I thought it'd be quite interesting to focus a bit on here, if you're happy with that.

Yeah, I'm very happy. Fascinating figure, who I've been looking at researching for a number of

years, and I think that the, the lady's book is a culmination of all of those years of really

trying to get under the skin of the man, so yeah, very happy to talk about him. And of course,

you know, Rommel, you know, he's so well known, isn't he, in Western spheres, because he was the

number one general of German general that fought against eight army in the Western desert,

so it was, was obviously there in on D-Day, and so on. So he's got this sort of almost cult-like

figure, isn't he? And of course, he was there in 1940 as well, sort of cutting a dash across

during the Blitzkrieg over France, crossing the Murs at a denon and kind of running rings

around everyone. And of course, you know, was, was, was the opposition when they finally managed to

do some sort of half-hearted counterattack on the 21st of May 1940, and there he was sort of

manhandling the eight millimeters up on that hill by the farm and all the rest of it, south of

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