Hello, I'm Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces.

You're listening to our podcast that explores the history and stories of our six palaces.

These talks are a collection of some of our best live events.

I really hope you enjoy listening.

History has traditionally taken a negative view of women in power.

This series of talks from our archive explores stories of powerful women and how their

legacies have been shaped by their gender. In this discussion, a panel of experts explore

the relationship between image and leadership,

and consider the question, what can we learn from the great leaders of history?

So I'm just going to introduce our speakers now.

So Jonathan Gifford to my right, Nigel Gennel to my left, and Kim Bernou Fereverl.

And now I just ask them to introduce themselves and tell you all a little bit about their link to the topic of leadership.

Jonathan, I'll start with you.

Oh, thank you. Good evening. I'm not booming too much, am I?

It's a great pleasure to be here. If the Duke of Wellington was alive, I don't think we would be here because he hated visitors. He thought visitors were. For that for security. If I just talk a bit, we'll talk some more about Wellington in a moment, but if I just talk about my interest in the subject matter, as it were. My background was in advertising and publishing

magazines and newspapers, but I'm now something of an amateur historian of leadership, I guess.

And in my book, History Lessons, I set out to explore 24, as it turned out, great leaders from history.

Most of them recognizably great in the sense that I didn't want to debate about. Is that a great leader or not? So we had George Washington,

Abraham, Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Napoleon, and so on. But what interested me was

what did they have in common, if anything.

And were they in any sense similar?

There was this search, especially in the 20th century, as it were, the defining characteristics

...