Start the Week

11/10/2010

In a special programme recorded at the Cheltenham Literature Festival Andrew Marr talks to Bernhard Schlink, author of 'The Reader', about his latest novel to be translated, which pits youthful idealism against the reality of terrorism. Margaret MacMillan explores the uses and abuses of history, while Peter Snow tries to unpick the man from the legend in his biography of Wellington. Sebastian Faulks explores the history of the novel, and discusses the challenges in both historical and contemporary fiction.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 40m
Broadcast on:: 11 Oct 2010
Audio Format:: other

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Literary festivals have, of course, spread across. Britain, as fast as latte, cellars and Nigella Lawson cookbooks. And the two genre, which pack in more eager people to town halls and tents than any others, are the modern novel, particularly if it's got a serious theme. And history, particularly I have noticed military history. So we're going to mingle both of them today. Later on, that fine Canadian historian Margaret McMillan sounds some notes of warning about the contemporary history mania. And Peter Snow, once known as the nation's swingometer man, now the battlefield man, describes his new history of Wellington. Before that, the novel. Sebastian Folks, one of Britain's best-loved novelists, whose most recent book deals with modern London terrorism and the crash. We'll be talking and to start with, I'm going to be speaking with the German novelist Bernhard Schlink, who's well known to many of us for the reader. His new book, The Weeknd, discusses terrorism as well, but in a more historical way. As a former leftist killer, is pardoned by the German president and freed from jail. Bernhard, let's start by sort of setting the scene for this novel. Your key character was a member of the Red Army faction. Of course, in Britain we have our history of terrorism to IRA terrorism. We've discussed it on this programme quite a few times, but that kind of German terrorism was very different because it was rooted in the middle of Germany, as it were. It was middle-class German children rebelling in a generational way. Yes, it started with students who, after '68, thought our parents didn't stand up against the injustices that the Nazis committed. Now, from German soil, the war in Vietnam is being supported. We have to not just protest, we have to do something. So it really has to do with this German past and with the moral conviction we have to do something. And then I think once you kill ones where you shouldn't have killed, and then twice, and then they went down ever further. And so they needed money, so they had to rob banks, and then they had to escape, and they had to shoot some more, so they got ever more into murderous activities. And then you anyway have dropped out of the moral community out of society. And they lost touch with sympathizers, with society, with reality. Yes. And to move to the novel, this takes place. One of the leaders, one of the killers, is allowed out of Gelsby's pardon, and his sister arranges a weekend for him, with some of the former comrades, of course, who have now gone on to do different things entirely. You know, fellow students who also were radical, went on demonstrations together, made small attempts of doing something demonstratively legal, but that was as far as it went for most of them. And then when he went underground, they stayed over ground, and became lawyers, and dentists, and journalists, and whatever. Now, I've called it a novel, and of course it is a novel, short novel, but in many ways it seemed more to me like a sort of medieval morality play. Something that you might find dramatized in the cathedral. It's a book about ideas, and about what is right, and what is wrong, and it is an argument sustained between the characters all the way through. Yes, they argue. They argue. I mean, they wonder how can they now see this person? How should they deal with this person? Can they accept him back into their group? He doesn't show remorse. He thinks, well, it was the wrong cause, because Germany, there was no pre-evolutional situation, so we made mistakes. But, well, on the other hand, it was war, and in war you made mistakes. So on the one hand, he's broken from these 20-something years in prison. At the same time, he hasn't really understood what he did wrong. How do you deal with such a person? And so this is, in a sense, an allegorical book as well, about how Germany, today, deals with that terrorist period. Yes, and the French represent different approaches to deal with them. So some think, well, they are our lost brothers and sisters. They went overboard, but they have the same roots of moral impulse and political radicalism. So we have to accept them back into our solidarity and others think, no, they have broken with the social contract. So we can't and everything in between. So it's a variety of ways to deal with him. What set you on the path for this particular theme? Well, that goes back into the '70s. I was about to become a professor and visited my parents one night with the hey days of terrorism. And my mother, who has a wonderful fantasy and also loves to think about moral problems, she said, "Brunut, I thought about if you should become a terrorist and flee the police and knock at our door, I would say to you, you can stay for the night, but tomorrow morning you have to go." And so I thought about this night, the terrorist talking to his parents, maybe his sister is there, maybe an old friend, neighbor's kid comes over. So they talk the whole night, terrorism as a chamber plane. And that was something that stayed on my mind and the situations changed and finally it became this weekend situation in the country house, again, terrorism in a chamber plane. Sebastian folks, your last book, Week in December, also features a terrorist character, very, very different, of course, much younger and the different cause, but what did you make of this? Well, I remember seeing what the butter mine hoof gang had done on television and I was a teenager and one of the things that shocked me as a kid watching on my parents television was the two of the principal figures were women and also the other thing that struck me was while student revolt and student activism in London was anti-Vietnam, Grovener Square and so on Paris burning, it was all, although serious, it was quite fun, but in Germany there was no fun and I wondered whether A, you thought the prominence of women was significant and B, whether the degree of murderousness and the lack of fun is in direct proportion to the degree of frustration felt with the parents. Yes, I think it's interesting, both women will take a mine hoof and good one ends in the other leading woman, they come from very Protestant moralizing backgrounds and so for them the beginning was a truly felt moral issue and then it was really a step by step going underground, becoming ever more murderous and losing touch with reality and when you lose touch with reality it either is much fun or no fun at all and for them there was really no fun at all. Peter Snow, I was struck by the intensity of the obsession that this German family had about it being victims of the past, I mean is it possible better to ask you whether this extraordinary agonizing about the past and not just the recent past, I mean going back to the 40s is something uniquely German, I mean what's it like to be in the position that you're in, in a country that seems so utterly obsessed still by things that happened half a century ago? We are talking about the 70s, there was no obsession definitely in the 50s and it began in the mid 60s and the student revolt of 68 was one response to finally finding out what the parent generation had done, my generation I was born in 44, we grew up not learning too much about the war and then in the mid 60s the Auschwitz trial, we began to learn what had happened as did [inaudible] and good one and then they thought well here is our parent generation and we loved them, we admired them but now we realize what they really did and we definitely don't want to do again or not do again what they did or didn't do. So it was a very personal obsession and now the fourth generation if you count generations has a much more relaxed attitude to that period. Margaret what did you make of this? One of the things that I found so interesting was the way in which when circumstances change so two of the causes there's this moment of embarrassment when the man who's just come out of prison who really is still thinking as he did 30 years ago, start to talk and they all get embarrassed and they think but things have changed, it's not that world anymore and there's the one young terrorist Marco who wants him to be as he was and is still talking about overthrowing capitalism and for the rest of them their lives have moved on and somehow talk of overthrowing capitalism seems completely pointless, I was fascinated by the passage of time but do you think if we were all plunged back into the 1970s we'd simply be incredibly embarrassed, not just about the clothes but by the way people were speaking and about their politics? Well you're always embarrassed by what you were like when you were young aren't you? I mean it's a different world but it's the people who don't change I think are so fascinating and I think you have people in that book who hadn't changed and how do they fit into this world and in some ways it's rather sad because some of the causes for which they initially became terrorists are still causes but nobody seemed to care about them anymore. There was a terrible character called Red Andy a long time ago I seem to remember, Sebastian folks were going to turn to your novels plural actually I think because you're best known obviously for the trilogy of French and wartime related books starting with Birdsong but then you jumped out of that to do a week in December which was a book about contemporary and modern London and I wondered how difficult it was moving from the historical form to the contemporary. In many ways it's very easy because you don't have to do very much research apart from specific areas and in a week in December there's finance which I had to try to understand the extraordinary unreal world in which bankers and hedge fund people operate which has really no connection with reality at all. Also there's a character you mentioned called Hassan who is coerced and corrupted by bad men from fundamentalist Islam to the verge of doing bad things so I needed to look into the religious and political and historical background of all that which was fascinating and really little understood I think by many people but obviously it's very easy to do the simple Tottenham were playing Arsenal that day and the traffic flows this way up Piccadilly and not that way which you know you just have to look out of your window so there was a great sort of relief in that but because the bad thing about writing a book set in the present is if you're interested in ideas and you're interested in themes that running that join your characters together and you hope will stimulate a sort of rather bigger experience in the reader it's very difficult to tell what to give the appropriate weight to what's going on in the world now it's just all chaff flying past you and you don't know how to value it how to measure it and how to weight it in your narrative and that is why I think it's very difficult to write a convincingly weighty book about the present unless you take a slightly satirical angle which is how my book a week in December turned out though it's not actually the book I set out initially to write. Well I was going to ask about that because if one thinks of the big Americans, Bello and Updike and we had Jonathan Franson on the program last week there is a sort of contemporary tradition in the states of very I don't mean dense in a bad way but very thick detailed moment by moment almost accounts of the present creating a verbal reality which has a sort of solidity and you just don't find that in the contemporary British novel you just don't and it's a bit of a hobby horse of mine is actually mentioned in the book and it's very strange I remember interviewing John Updike years ago for a newspaper and I told him I just written a book set in provincial France in 1936 and he looked at me so I was mad and he said but I just look outside my window at middling troubled America and there is all the material I need for my whole life but British writers find it very difficult to write about middling troubled Britain without becoming self-conscious and they find very important. >> I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important to write about the book and I think it's important 100 years ago or whether it's about contemporary Britain. Is there a sort of fight in your mind about whether it's mentioned real people or not and whether to talk about real events or not? The basic rule I think and Bernhard and any other novelist would agree is that things you state as being historically factual must be factual checked and verifiably not inaccurate but the feelings that you ascribe to your fictional characters can be entirely invented with the proviso that you did go through these things don't say to you that's not how it felt at all so it's an act of imaginative empathy to float yourself into the mind of a First World War soldier about to go over the top on the 1st of July 1916 but that is what you do as a novelist that's what you're selling to the public the ability to do that but there is also a sense in which to keep these things separate I mean every time an elderly S.O.E. woman passes away and this happened recently this marvelous woman only a few weeks ago people ring me up and say you know was your character Charlotte Grey based on this woman to which my reply is no this woman was far far better agent far superior person in every way and you have to keep these distinctions absolutely clear based on is is a bad thing for character Bernhard. I'm still thinking about what you said about the contemporary British novel dealing with today's problems has to become a satire or become satirical and we dreamt's definitely could need more satire in our lives at the same time it's not that the British don't take themselves seriously and so that doesn't really convince me as the reason or is it that in this particular case with this particular topic of the financial crisis we feel our powerlessness to such an extent that the only way to deal with our powerlessness is to become satirical. I don't know the answer to that but I would like to mention Gunter Grass I mean you know it may well be that the first time that Germany began to reconcile itself to what had happened was through the means of magic realism. Okay but magic realism is not the same as satire. No, no it isn't but it's not realism it's not head on either it's not it's not it's not Roth up Di bello country. And you don't think that it's our powerlessness vis-a-vis this financial crisis and you rightly say what they've done to us is so incredible and we well what else can we do we just take it and move on with our lives and give them money so that they. But there is a real linguistic or verbal problem I think with the financial crisis in terms of whether you're dramatising it or putting into a novel which is that there is an entire parallel language which isn't quite English certainly isn't English which is used to describe what's going on and is designed to keep people out. It's one of those forms of language designed to make you think I can't understand this it's not for me. Well that's what Bob Diamond said when he was criticized as a you know being appointed head of Barclays recently his his response to the criticism was people don't understand what we do well we do understand what they do it's really not that hard and you don't want to let a few words put you off I mean derivative or whatever the word is CDO some of it's complicated but basically it's dead simple. With that thought we'll turn to the other subject that comes up again and again festivals of literature which is history. It's never been as popular history television radio seem to be obsessed by history in a way that perhaps we haven't been for a very long time. Margaret McMillan you've written many interesting history works of your own but you've now turned to the whole question of what history is doing to the culture and the dangers in this. You've called your new book the uses and abuses of history and so let's start by asking we talked about the history of the bottom mine half group and so on. What are the most dangerous things that this history obsession can bring us? I think history is very important and I feel strongly an educated person should know about history but what it can do is give I think much too simple a view of the past. I think there's a tremendous nostalgia for example for the Second World War because it was the last clearly good war depending which side you were on but I think it's seen in very clear cut terms which I think makes it too simple. I think there's a danger in making the past something that is a morality tale with goodies and baddies and good sides and bad sides. I think where history can also be very dangerous if it gives you a false sense of what you are. I mean history is so tied up with identity. We are what we are partly because of our personal histories and partly because of the group history into which whichever group we're born into. And I think we tell ourselves stories about ourselves. We come from a nation that was always victimized, that never did anything awful to anyone else so we come from a nation that was always right. And I think this can lead groups of people to do awful things to other people. I mean I think history can be used to mobilize people. We saw it in the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. It can be used to mobilize people to do atrocious things to their neighbours. On the grounds that you can never trust a server, you can never trust a crowd, you can never trust a Bosnia because those people have always been like that. And so I think what history should do is open minds but what it seems to be doing often is closing them. There seems to be a big difference obviously between closed or authoritarian societies which impose a false history. From the time we'll talk about that in a minute. And liberal, open democratic societies where the danger is more of the history that we choose to consume. History is comfort food. Well I think there's a lazy win which we treat history in liberal democracies and that is we pick bits out, we pick bits out that confirm our views of ourselves or we use it from morality tales, we look at disgraceful episodes and say that shouldn't happen again. And I think what we don't do and what we seem to me not to be doing in our schools is giving people any sense of chronology. I mean unless you understand the order in which things happened. You don't understand. And I mean I've taught a number of students to whom I have had to explain that we call it World War II because there was in fact a World War I which they find interesting as they should. It comes to them as quite a revelation often. But I think we also parcel it out. And so I mean there's an awful lot, I mean I speak about North America but I think also the UK where little bits of history are taken, isolated from each other or they're put into things called civics classes or they're put into classes about being good citizens. And you end up with people who don't have a sense of the pattern of the past and don't have a sense of the complexity of the past. It seems to me dangerous because when we get political leaders saying oh we must invade Iraq for example we must invade Iraq because history teaches us that you can't let dictators like Saddam who say go unpunished. We don't know enough to challenge them and say wait a minute. History also teaches us that we got into trouble last time for instance. Yeah I mean there are many reasons. Exactly there are many lessons in history and I think the best thing that history can do is give you both a sense of the past but also give you the ability to ask good questions. I mean I think we should all be skeptics when people say history shows that we must do such and such. My immediate instinct is to say oh yeah you know let's look at this. But at least we can have a debate and a conversation about this. If you look at what's happening to the rewriting of history books for schools included in Russia then you've got much more sinister examples of the rewriting of history. Well I think dictators have always taken history very seriously because they know it can be used to push people in a certain direction and if you teach only one sort of history you're not allowing your population or you're trying to prevent them from being aware of alternatives. So if you say that the system we have has always been the right system for us and they don't have any sense of what alternatives might exist. And Russia is worrying I think because there was an openness at the end of the Soviet Union when the Russians did admit that they had murdered Poles in the forest at Katin and they did admit that they had been a pact with the Nazis. And that's now being taken back again. It's been removed out of the textbooks and more and more. I mean the way Stalin's being treated in the textbooks. Stalin was necessary for his times they say. He made a few mistakes but he was a good thing on the whole. You know this is not good I think for the future of democracy in Russia. And something parallel seems to me to be happening in China. I watched quite a lot of these Chinese historical films which are pouring out at the moment. And they all seem to be about the good guys are the central emperors kind of bloodily and aggressively enforcing Chinese unity and bringing the Chinese people together and making sure the foreign devils around the edge are kept out. And you know clearly these are the sort of messages that the state in China wants to propagate. Yes and they also push the whole idea that Tibet has always been part of China historically which is a very shaky argument indeed. So is the argument vis-a-vis Taiwan. The Communist Party I think and this worries me I think has run out of Steve ideologically. I mean what does it stand for when you have capitalist members of the Communist Party? It's not really a Communist Party anymore. And I think more and more they're using patriotic education and nationalism to try and bring a sense of unity to China. But they are telling a very particular story. And they're telling a story which doesn't do justice to the very complex history of China. It doesn't do justice to China's neighbors because the story they're telling is one where China's always been right and benevolent and people who have resisted China have always been wrong. And if I were a neighbor of China I would be worried about this sort of history. Do you think that the developments in technology, particularly on the internet and so on, are going to give us a better kind of history? Because at the moment somebody writes a history book, it goes out there, other people bite and more or less that is that it's much harder to heckle and question a historical narrative. But presumably that now gets easier. Instead of making a one-off program or a series of TV programs or writing a one-off book, you can begin a conversation which can carry on almost forever. But I'm wondering how much people talk about the liberating effects of the internet, but I'm wondering how much people actually want free conversations. What seems to me also to be happening on the internet is people for looking for websites and for other groups who will confirm the opinions they already have. But it seems to me there's some very worrying stuff on the internet with groups that promote a very particular version of history, conspiracy theories or particular views of other people. And it seems to me we're in danger of having a whole lot of communities where people go in and find people who will simply reinforce the prejudices they already have. I'm not sure that the internet is necessarily liberating. Sebastian, your book gives many, many examples of politicians selectively using and manipulating history to justify themselves and their parties and so on. It seems to me one of the difficulties is getting politicians really fully to absorb the complexities of history. And this isn't really being helped in this country. Is it by the fact that the last government took history off the national curriculum as a compulsory subject? So what hope is there for our future politicians? It does worry me because I think both of the politicians themselves and also for us as citizens, because if we don't know enough to question what they're saying, and that is something that history... History doesn't provide answers, but it does open up a range of possibilities. It does make you aware that certain things may lead to trouble. And it worries me because I know politicians are under tremendous pressure and they have to think in the short term, but if they have no sense of the context, neither Bush or Blair were prepared to contemplate the possibility that the people of Iraq might not want foreigners coming in and telling them what to do. And the most cursory knowledge of the history of Iraq should have told them that is precisely how the Iraqis would react. They've had enough of people coming in and pushing around. There were plenty of clever historians working in the State Department and the Foreign Office, and so on, who had all of that information. It's just that it wasn't convenient at the time, Bernhard Schlink. Margaret, myths have played such a big role in the history of nations, uniting them and giving them a sense of coherence, a sense of identity. Would you say the times when nations needed myths are over? Today they can all live with the truth as it is. Or are there some innocent myths, like Wilhelm Tell, who doesn't do any harm as a myth, that nations can and maybe even should live with? I think the things that we can be proud of, I mean I think British Isles should be proud of having created a constitutional democracy. I mean it's taken a long time to get here, but I think they have worked towards something that actually worked quite well for most people. And so I think there's nothing wrong with being proud of moments in your past. I wouldn't call them myths, I mean they are things that you can be proud of. But you should be also aware of the things that you have done as a people that you shouldn't be proud of. And it seems to me that's the adult way that a nation should behave if it comes of age. I'm always suspicious of myths because I think they lead to falsehood and distortion and so I think we need to be careful. But they're not going away I don't think. I mean you look at the myths for example that the United States tells about itself. And that of course leads us to the problem of heroes because we want our heroes to be straightforward. We want them to be simple, we don't want them to be complicated. Peter Snow your new book to war with Wellington deals with one of the iconic British heroes. And to put it shortly in many ways he's a bit of a stinker. Oh yes, oh ruthless man, a ruthless man. But by gosh he won every battle he fought. He was a winner and his men didn't love him. They admired him and respected him. And they were grateful that he was a chap who was in charge because he licked the French as they said every time. And as far as they were concerned they were in the right hands. Yes but intensely arrogant and vain, venal in many ways and terribly upset private life as well. After the battle of Waterloo he famously said my goodness if it hadn't been for me I didn't think this battle would have been won. The trouble is Andrew he was right. I mean he wasn't, he may have been, I don't think he was conceited. He was genuinely realist about the world around him. And he never, for example he never attacked a French army that he thought would beat him. He was very careful, very careful always to choose the moment to have a battle. You've got a cautious general. He was always frightened of Napoleon turning around from the real enemy in Central Eastern Europe. And coming down and fighting him in Spain, Portugal, Southern France. He was actually very careful, very, very calculating and wise operator. He was also somebody who pushed Napoleon's generals one by one out of Southern Europe and therefore did contribute to the final defeat of Napoleon. The first defeat of Napoleon prior to Waterloo and Napoleon coming back. But do you think that in Britain, and I'm coming back to our national stories, we make too much of those peninsula campaigns given the Titanic battles that were being fought in Germany and Austria and Russia? Yes, I mean it certainly would be an abuse of history to use Margaret's phrase to say that Wellington single-handedly beaten Napoleon. That would be absurd. It was far more important for us, rather than the Second World War, that the Russians and Prussians and Austrians did while they did in Central Eastern Europe. But he was absolutely critical. I mean he was undermining Napoleon for five, six years from 1808 to 1814, constantly undermining Napoleon. What really excites me about the thing is the fact that we have for the first time in history, for the first war in history, we have this huge amount of evidence from ordinary soldiers, from ordinary soldiers right up to generals, who colour for us at what it was like to fight on a campaign. In journals and letters and documents of all kinds. This one really got me going, reading the material and the letters and the journals and the memoirs. One chap, Chapel George Simmons, wonderful bloke, had a big big hat like some of the chap's did in those days. He carried three notebooks, his hat, and he would go every day, he'd take a notebook out and start scribbling down his story and write it home to his mum and dad. And submerging yourself in all of that, what's the difference in perspective that you get? You get the humanity of it, you get the suffering, the awful primitive conditions, the state of medicine, told by ordinary soldiers. You get this picture of how it was like to fight a war. Just like in the Second World War, the First World War, we had these wonderful dairies and letters and memoirs today. But this is really the first war in history when you begin to get people, telling you what it was like. And the picture, not any other battlefield I may say, but the mischief and the outrageous stuff they got up to off the battlefield too. It is an extraordinarily very revealing story about human nature. I was going to ask Bernhard because if there's one thing that we sort of all know about the battle of Waterloo, it's the moment when both the British and the French are looking over at the Prussians coming towards the battle to the rescue. And no one's quite sure whether in black uniforms or blue uniforms, unless they know it's black, no it's blue, no it's black, no it's blue, and eventually it turns out to be blue her. But I wonder whether in Germany the battle of Waterloo is thought of and described in an entirely different way. Well, the quote by Wellington that we learn is not the one that you just gave, but Wellington saying I wished it night would fall or the Prussians would come. That's what we learn in school and the Prussians came. And so the battle of Waterloo was won. So yes, probably the perspective is a little bit different and that certainly, well also a distortion of history that focuses on that part that was part of our collective memory. Very interesting. It also struck me, Sebastian, that because of the letters and because of the written records and the ordinary soldiers, this is now a form of warfare which in many ways is close to us like the First World War is close to us. And totally different from say the Seven Years War or the campaigns of Marlborough, for instance, where we don't have that kind of written record. Yeah, you do get a sense of this from Peter's book and the individual experience. I wondered reading it whether Peter had a psychological picture of what really motivated Wellington. You describe him as a realist and cautious and so on and I'm sure this is right. But we sometimes think of Churchill as someone whose extraordinary resolution came from the fact that as a young man he conquered his depression, black dog as he called it and so on. I wondered if you had a sort of psychological key in your mind to the extraordinary resolution that Wellington displayed in his campaign. He was an Anglo-Irishman. He came from quite a lonely background. He once said, "I want to walk alone." I think he was a man they withdrawn, very aloof, who did tend to look down on that long nose of his soldiers. I mean, I didn't think that, really did not love him very much. Very hard-bitten, cold, decisive chap who always reckoned he'd made the right decision. There's a lot of talk these days about how well or badly we treat veterans, particularly wounded veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq. But when you read how the veterans of Waterloo were then treated by the country and indeed by Wellington, that's a pretty horrible story too, isn't it? It's a nasty story and many of the people in the book, I mean, I brought them talking about what they thought of Wellington. Many of them really resented this and the pensions were, you say, very stingy. Margaret, what did you make? I think I should probably fess up that Margaret and Peter, a brother and sister-in-law, before anybody, points it out in the newspaper columns. I think I'm right in saying that the last veteran of Waterloo died in Canada, was it? Yes, 1892. 1892. Extraordinary. Yes. Well, coming up to 2015, and that will be the big bicentenary. It certainly will. It'll also be a bicentenary, of course, in France, where they've got a problem still about how they deal with Napoleon, don't they, Margaret? Yes, and this happens in a lot of countries. I mean, I think we fight over our history because it says something about who we like to think we are. And for the French dealing with Napoleon is very tricky. There's been a huge debate recently of French historian wrote a book and said, let's stop all this stuff about Napoleon being a hero. He was a mass murderer and he was a tyrant and let's face it. He was nothing glorious about him. But the French had the same battles over the French Revolution. I mean, they had such wars over the French Revolution that in the end they had to get an outsider to come in and do the big celebratory parade in Paris because they didn't dare have anyone French doing it. Well, for all of our younger listeners, the Battle of Waterloo took place not only before the Second World War, but also before the First World War. And was really quite a long time ago. It's been a lively discussion. Thank you to all my guests, Peter Snow, Margaret McMillan, Sebastian Forks, and Bernhard Schlink. Details for all of their books are on the start of the week website. Next week we've got a special program about morality, religion and politics with Mary Warnock, Raymond Talis, the American theologian Stanley Halowas and the former MP John Gummer. But for now, thank you and goodbye. [Applause] [Music] The winter blowout sale is happening now at your local Big R. Huge savings on winter essentials. Get 25% off beanies for the family, cozy winter gloves and all women's winter stars. Need to gear up with bibs, coats and vests? Shop now. Insiders save 30% off. Stay prepared for the snow with 20% off in stock snow throwers. And don't forget your furry friends. All outdoor heated cat houses and heated dog beds are 20% off. Warm up your home with huge savings on electric heaters and pellet stones. Almost anything you need. 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Producer: Katy Hickman.