Welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of Encompass. Go to InCompass-Hevon

for free access to all our podcasts to date. This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with

Michael Peel. Michael Peel is the European diplomatic correspondent based in Brussels for the Financial Times.

He is also reported for the EFT from Southeast Asia, the Middle East and West Africa.

His new book is called The Fabulous, The World's New Rulers, Their Myths and the Struggle Against Them.

So, Michael, let's set out your stall. You talk about the modern age of fabulous. What is the modern age of fabulous?

Well, Paul, this book is the product, as you indicated in the intro, of years of reporting

experience in different places which are, of course, contrasted geographically, culturally,

linguistically, and yet in many of them, many years of traveling in the Middle East,

Southeast Asia, Europe and elsewhere, I began to notice certain patterns in terms of how leaders

and political movements, demagogues and authoritarian, sell themselves and the kind of narratives

that they spin, the stories that they tell to get support.

And so this is a book really about importance of interrogating those stories and it's an account of

how these political figures in an age of distraction, as it's often dubbed these days with

so many events, so much digital information, how they've

thrived in that age, and in ways that are very worrying.

And I really highlight that.

But at the same time, it's not a kind of manifesto of despair because I also meet a lot

of people who are resisting and questioning these stories as well.

So it's also a book about them.

Well, let's avoid the spoiler alert to the beginning.

You talk a lot about what you call national myth making.

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