Dan Snow's History Hit - Our Obsession with Nostalgia

Episode Date: May 24, 2022

Longing to go back to the 'good old days' is nothing new. For hundreds of years, the British have mourned the loss of older national identities and called for a revival 'simple', 'better' ways of life - from Margaret Thatcher's call for a return to 'Victorian values' in the 1980s to William Blake's protest against the 'dark satanic mills' of the Industrial Revolution that were fast transforming England's green and pleasant land. But were the 'good old days' ever quite how we remember them?Hannah Rose Woods is a cultural historian, writer and contributor. Hannah joins Dan on the podcast to explore Britain's fixation with its own past— debunking pervasive myths and asking why nostalgia has been such an enduring emotion across hundreds of years of change.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's History. Back from Egypt, it was 46 degrees centigrade.

Thank you for all the interactions on social media. People laughing at me, saying I looked a bit fatigued and sweaty. Well, that's because I was fatigued and sweaty. People laughing at me saying I looked a bit fatigued and sweaty. Well, that's because I was fatigued and sweaty. But we're bringing you fantastic content for History Hit TV, for the podcast, for Channel 5 here in the UK as well. It's all happening over at History Hit.

A programme about the Valley of the Kings, the great discoveries from ancient times to Belzoni to Carter and beyond. Exciting stuff. We made lots of pods, so you'll be able to listen to it all. We made some TV shows, so if you've got a history hit TV, it's our digital history channel, Netflix for history. You'll go over there, you'll be seeing a lot of ancient Egypt. If Egyptology is your thing, if you're interested in the head that donned the Uraeus, the ancient crown symbolising the unity of upper and lower Egypt in the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms, then this is the place for you. All you've got to do, if you listen to this podcast, is look at the device on which you're

listening to it, click on the link which is in the accompanying notes of the podcast, just click on that little link, you get taken straight to history at TV. You are going to love it. Outstanding stuff. In the meantime though, folks, I've got the brilliant Hannah Woods on the podcast. She's a brilliant historian. You've heard her here before. She's super smart. She's an online phenomenon. She's published a great book. It's a history of nostalgia. It turns out nostalgia ain't what it used to be. We've always looked back on the golden era before we were born as better times. Personally, despite reading this brilliant book and talking to Hannah, the 1990s were better than now, objectively. Oasis was at its peak. We thought we'd escaped the threats of a gigantic nuclear confrontation, which would extinguish probably human life on Earth. Arsenals

of weapons controlled by lunatics. We thought those days were behind us. And we also thought naively that the era of armies of tanks rolling across the great plains of eastern europe were at an end so i'm kind of nostalgic for that anyway hannah points out there's lots of nostalgia knocking around everyone's always felt nostalgic you know in the 1990s people were very nostalgic for some other time don't know why but they were so it's brilliant great talk to hannah she's an absolute legend and after you listen to this go and get nostalgic for some history get a history hit tv following that link in the description but before you do so here's the excellent Hannah Woods

Hannah great to have you back on the pod oh thank you for having me it's so fun being on this podcast because I'm getting so old now it's been going so long that you were on the pod before and you mentioned, I've got these future plans. I think I'm going to write this book about nostalgia. I was like, that sounds lovely. And now here it is. Boom, this massive tome. You've nailed it.

So well done you. Yeah, you were the first person to hear about the Nostalgia Project in the distant pre-COVID days at the end of 2019. I'm nostalgic for that time. We all are. Okay. So what I love about the history of nostalgia is so clever. We always think the old days were the best days, do we? Yes. I think it's fair to say people have always felt the good old days were, you know, behind us and people have always looked back and rose-tinted the past. I look at my generation and particularly older people,

I mean, people will joke about boomers and stuff. Is that partly because we all preferred it when we were 21? The important distinction, of course, is that people like Margaret Thatcher talk about a past they never even experienced. And my generation, sort of middle-aged white men say, oh, wouldn't it be great during the Blitz, which they never experienced. But partly, is there a human impulse just to

celebrate the past? Because we were younger and our knees didn't hurt. Yeah, we're all primed to, you know, forget the squabbles, the frustrations, the minor aches and pains. You know, we're psychologically primed to remember the good times, even if we perhaps didn't appreciate them at the time as we feel that we then should. But I think that's quite different to romanticising a time that you never inhabited, as you say, looking back to perhaps like a war that you never fought in, you know, in romanticising the Blitz spirit. It's something quite different. It's not nostalgia for your experience, it's nostalgia for your memories of history. And I think that's what we're seeing a lot in the culture wars at the moment. You know, there is a huge emotional investment in the ideas about history that people perhaps first learned

about as children, that they've carried with them throughout their lives. And I think at the moment, there's a lot of resistance coming from certain sections of society, from historians and heritage workers that say, well, maybe things weren't quite as simple as you'd first been told, you know, maybe things are more complex. And maybe we can be reassessing the past in the light of the present, as people have always done, you know, historians have always been rewriting history, no matter how angry politicians might get about that today. But isn't it weird, we fetishise now, because as someone who's up to my eyeballs in World War II Twitter, I get people talking about that generation.

My goodness me, we can never do what they've done. What amazing. And weirdly, that generation were fetishising the great, rugged and robust imperial frontiersmen of the 1890s, right? So we're always chasing some weird ghost. Yeah, we are, absolutely. We're always chasing some weird ghost. Yeah, we are, absolutely. On the other hand, people who had lived through two world wars often kind of look back and yearn for what they perceived

as the lost innocence of rural life. There's always kind of two sides to our nostalgia. On the one hand, we're nostalgic for the hardships and struggles of previous generations. On the other, you know, the kind of good old days. You're right, that's such a good point. So there's that nostalgia that you get through in Hardy. I know we're jumping time periods a bit here. It's like talking about the threshing, the whole communities going out. So in the mid-20th century, the people that we now look back on as these kind

of ultimate generation, they're just super sad that they're no longer, you know, reading under the willow boughs in a less connected world. It's a weird phenomenon. Yeah. Just picking up on Hardy, we now look back on his kind of Wessex world very nostalgically. Hardy himself was kind of furious that he was being read in that way.

Of course, he was talking about how lovely the countryside is and spinning these kind of mythic pastoral tales, but he was also saying, you know, rural life is incredibly hard. There are real hardships here. Critics were furious when he published Jude the Obscure. As far as they were concerned, he was supposed to be focusing on this lovely kind of rose-tinted vision of the countryside that people associated with the past. You know, he wasn't supposed to be focusing on the miseries of rural depression. We look back very selectively.

And I guess nationalism, which I have talked about in this podcast quite a lot, nationalism is just a giant exercise in sort of imagining a past, right? So nostalgia and nationalism are intimately linked. Yeah, I mean, no one has ever woken up on any given day and thought, this is a quintessentially British day. This is the British time. You know, we've always located the essence of national identity in the past. There's always, I think, a sense of lost glory that, you know, is kind of both forever out of reach and kind of holds out this tantalising promise that we could restore it once more. And I think it requires a huge number of imaginative feats

to kind of connect ourselves to people who shared our geography long ago, but whose worldviews, values were often incredibly different. I think the biggest irony of our perpetual nationalist nostalgia, I think, is that the things that people romanticise today, say Brexiteers will invoke this kind of glorious history of free trading Britain, setting out around the globe in search of new markets to conquer, bringing these goods back home. That's kind of invoked as a quintessentially British prideful story. But actually, if we go back to the 18th century,

free trade, free market capitalism was a source of tremendous anxiety to people. They felt it was really straining this kind of bounded national identity, you know, an island nation. They felt they might kind of be swamped by the ambitions of kind of global Britain. Yeah, I mean, it's a bit Dutch, right? Dutch finance. Like, I mean, they get that expression among the Tories in the 8th century. And actually nostalgia, obviously, in Russia and Ukraine, nostalgia for the Soviet Union. I was struck as well, nostalgia for kind of 1950s America, where there is this idea of sort of settled communities and the centrality of family and underlying it all, this idea of an unchallenged white dominance of politics and stuff like that. And yet, income tax was through the roof under Eisenhower. Modern right-wing people would regard that as like communism. So it's extraordinary what, as you say, the kind of imaginative leaps and contortions that we have to get into to make all this stuff make sense.

Nostalgia isn't always genuinely about a yearning to return to the past it's often very kind of alchemical and mercurial how people especially on the right at the moment use it that actually we kind of have this idea around this discourse of imperial nostalgia in Britain at the moment that it's a regressive escapist impulse that it means people are stuck in the past, unable to face the future. And I don't actually think that is how they're using their nostalgia for the past at all. They're yoking that nostalgia to a vision of change and transformation. The Brexiteers arguing for kind of deregulation, leaving the EU, massive change, and yet yoke to this comforting story of, well, Britain's always contained this essence and we're just trying to kind of recapture it and infuse it back into the present.

So that's really interesting. Like in the 17th century, you get these lawyers who sort of discover Magna Carta and just kind of mobilise it to get involved in a fight against Charles I. So our agenda is in fact steeped in Englishness. You might think this is dangerous, but actually don't worry. We're in keeping with this kind of deeper historical tradition. So speaking of all that, you've written a history of nostalgia. I love the idea that everyone's always looking back.

Let's go through it. Talk to me about Tudor nostalgia, because everyone I meet is obsessed with Anne Boleyn and the fashion and the food and whatever else of the Tudor period. So tell me, what in the 16th century were they nostalgic for? Everything. It was a time of huge upheaval. This is a period in which we get a real sense that people are expressing a sense of being suddenly cut off from the past. And it's mainly to do with the Reformation, a time of huge religious change, the break with Rome, and people start to look

back to an England defined by its Catholic identity, you know, this kind of mythic merry England of saints days and May games when everyone had more fun. And, you know, there were more holidays in the calendar, this rose-tinted image of hearty, well-fed peasants. Any change that then happened, people kind of bundled that into a kind of sense that the Reformation had caused this rupture between past and present and that everything was better in the olden days. Right, because yeah, the 14th and 15th centuries were fantastic. Yeah, famously.

Like if you had a choice between drops and a time machine, you would not tick those boxes. Okay, I love that. And of course, the 17th century, a succession of civil wars across these kingdoms of these isles. And I guess when you're locked in gigantic conflict, it must boost nostalgia even more. You must kind of eulogise the past. Yeah, I mean, I think it boosts nostalgia, but it also always has and always will boost people's desire to kind of weaponise the past to serve their agenda. This is what we see in the civil wars in the 17th century that, say, cavaliers are looking back to, they call it England's fortunate islands, this land flowing with milk and honey that was suddenly ruined by these upstart

Puritans who seized control of Parliament. And then with the restoration, they kind of look forward to Charles II as the merry monarch who would come back and restore this mythically merry England. On the other hand, parliamentarians were also giving history spin to bolster their cause. moment when the crown kind of generously granted these concessions to nobles. That was when the people reasserted their ancient freedoms and they looked back to this kind of putative Anglo-Saxon inheritance. What's they called? The wield or something like that is some weird stuff there. You must've got really into that. This imaginary Anglo-Saxon proto-democratic kind of vibe going on. That's like a fever dream. Yeah, I think the most fascinating thing when I started researching was that actually we haven't always viewed the Anglo-Saxons in this way. I think we're all quite familiar now with the ways in which historically the idea of Anglo-Saxonism has been mobilised by imperialists and by English racists. But we kind of take it for granted

that they're, in inverted commas, like the quintessential English predecessors. But actually, when you get back to the Tudor era, they weren't really holding the Anglo-Saxons in very high esteem at all. As far as people were concerned midway through the Reformation, fighting for the Protestant cause, the Anglo-Saxons were these people who'd first embraced Catholicism in England. And actually, they were kind of seeing them as these invaders that had scattered the ancient Britons. And they were looking back to the ancient Britons as this kind of mythically nostalgic origin myth. And then you get the 18th century, which is obviously close to my heart.

What are we nostalgic for in the 18th century? We've got Britain expanding across the globe as a global sort of hard power. We've got the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, transformation of our landscape, farming's changing. So what are people nostalgic for? In many ways, it's a great time to be alive. Britain's power and prestige on the world stage is expanding. People have kind of generally never been more prosperous as an expanding group of middle class consumers. You know, there are lots of reasons to feel positive. But there's a real sense that people have kind of lost their virtue somehow. You know, there's this consumer revolution. It's the great age of urban entertainments and pleasures and fashions. But there are lots of traditionalists looking back and saying things used to be simpler. We used to be a kind of modest and virtuous people. We used to be like those upstanding citizens in Rome. Oh, yes. The Rome stuff.

Yes. They look back to the Roman Empire and felt, what if Rome fell through an appetite for bread and circuses? And what if our kind of taste for luxury indicates that we're heading in that direction too? And God, we've got to recapture that kind of spirit, the virtuous spirit of moderation and civic duty. So, yeah, there are lots of anxieties about actually the ways in which things are manifestly getting better, because the lessons of history kind of seem to suggest that empires that swelled to achieve great things were in for a fall. You listen to Dan Snow's history. More coming up. Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb.

And on my podcast, Not Just the Tudors, I like to talk with historians about, well, just about everyone and everything. From the real Anne Boleyn. Everyone that knew her said how engaging she was. To a superstar artist. It's hard not to pay attention to Dürer. From celebrity executioners. It's a big public spectacle. All the eyes are on you. To a teenage werewolf.

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Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. so then we get the 19th century which is when i mean surely that's the i am actually nostalgic for the nostalgia of the 19th century because they went full crazy didn't they i mean just our parliament building is a gigantic monument to nostalgia for example well yes and no i think oh okay go famously it is a time when pre-Raphaelite painters, poets, the arts and crafts movement are all looking back to the inspirations of the medieval past, which they see as the shining opposite of the dark satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution. But I don't actually think there are many more optimistic societies about the future than the Victorians.

Intense nostalgia, I think, often coincides with intense pride. People don't necessarily look back to the past because they genuinely want to roll back the modern world. I think our nostalgia can often have a compensatory function that we can, for example, look back to the lovely architecture of the Middle Ages and think, oh, isn't that wonderful? But actually not want to give up any of the material benefits of the modern world. And actually, I think the Houses of Parliament is a great example of that. Its medievalism is absolutely only skin deep. In many ways, as a building, it was a monument to the scientific innovations of the 19th century. It has a cast iron roof below the kind of gothic finials and the tracery of the windows. And that required steam powered cranes to hoist the girders high

into the air. It was a building that really made use of the scientific innovations that were kind of making Britain the most advanced industrial nation. You're totally right. As you're speaking, I'm thinking about the conservation movement as well today. And it is kind of nostalgic in a way that we all go, crikey, we've destroyed this planet. And we do need to return to a way of living, which is better for the planet and us, like go out and be around trees more and spend time with family and get off screens, whatever it is, which will also use less resource. And so it's nostalgic, but it's also intensely focused on the present and future. Like, it's not a negative nostalgia. So maybe that's the kind of Victorian model, I guess.

Yeah, well, I think, you know, if we're going to solve the environmental crisis, we're going to need to make use of brand new technologies, as well as kind of rooting things in a kind of nostalgic vision of nature. And, you know, I think every age has been the same. So, yeah, because, I mean, I'm thinking now about, I've had a weekend talk about rewilding in my area around Burmese, so like removing the harmful effects of industrial agriculture around Burmese and promoting more traditional.

That's nostalgia, but that's good. So we're not laughing at nostalgic people and things in your work. I mean, it is not wholly negative. No, and it's a universal human impulse. It's something we all feel. And I don't think it's helpful to anyone to kind of scorn the things that other people are nostalgic about. We're all sentimental.

But on the other hand, that's not history. Nostalgia for the past isn't the same thing as history, as we mean it, as an academic discipline with standards for interpreting the past and I think we all need to balance you know our very human and very innate impulse to rose tint the past with a critical sense of history as an academic discipline. What about and I think we still do this now our response to living in industrial world working in factories and buildings and not working our hands outdoors, most of us anymore, has been to sort of celebrate the simpler life. People go, I'd love to have a

small holding. And I say, I can't think of anything worse. Do you have any idea how miserable it is to have to look after animals all day, including you can't go on holiday. And maybe that is a reflection of how awful working conditions are in the modern world for so many of us. Or maybe it is just pure fantasy and nostalgia. But we do go back and we try and think, I'd love to live like Wesley and the Princess Bride, just with a little farm. You know, we're not the first generation to have wrestled with that paradox. This was a huge debate around the turn of the 20th century. You had towering Victorian critics of industrialism like John Ruskin and William Morris saying, you know, the terrible thing about the Industrial Revolution is people don't make things with their hands anymore.

They're on a kind of factory production line. So they're not seeing projects through to completion. People have been robbed of a sense of satisfaction from their work. And they felt that workers themselves were unfortunately starting to take on the character of machines as they went about their jobs because of the logic of industrial capitalism. So they were very keen on getting people back to the land. They wanted to kind of put joy back into labour really. And they felt the way to do that was to get people out into nature, making beautiful things with their hands again. But then you have people like HG Wells,

who come along and say, well, that's such a champagne socialist fantasy that only middle class people would have of, you know, this idea of how lovely it is to work on the land and to do backbreaking manual labour. And he was a strong advocate for the best thing about the Industrial Revolution is that it's made it possible to not have to work with your hands. And actually, we should be focusing on what people can do with their leisure time now. So yeah, I mean, these debates have a long history. You call Stanley Baldwin the Prime Minister of Nostalgia. So he obviously comes in after the First World War. Is your point there that Britain, in terms of its imperial presence in the world, is in deep trouble? First, they technically won

the First World War, but Britain has been almost bankrupted. Its economy has been overtaken. Its grasp on unwilling portions of its empire has been weakened inevitably. And yet the 20s and 30s, you can kind of float along still thinking that all is well. How does nostalgia work in that period? I think, yeah, you're absolutely right. I think the other element to the 20s and 30s is how fast culture's changing some really measurably good ways. Jazz? Yes, jazz. We kind of sometimes make a bit too much of the

concept of the roaring 20s in Britain when that was, you know, perhaps more of an American phenomenon. But nonetheless, young people are socialising more freely. There are more cocktail bars, nightclubs, printed literature is becoming a lot cheaper, thanks to advances in technology. There's more entertainment on the radio. In a lot of ways, people are really, really embracing the new in the 1920s and 30s. All these things are true at once. There is a huge amount of traumatised reaction to the First World War, a huge amount of anxiety over the rise of mass democracy, the general strike, the sense that workers might bring the country to a halt, Britain might slide into Bolshevism. And yes, there is also still a huge amount of nostalgia and we can just pretend that we're still a kind of lovely traditional pastoral country and that none of these things have happened. Or a kind of imperial hegemon as well.

It's presumed there's different overlapping nostalgias there. They look back to the latter half of the 19th century and still think, hey, we've still got it. But it's a time of really ridiculing those imperialist narratives that many people felt had culminated in the First World War, an imperialistic culture that had sent people into the trenches on the promise of heroism and glory. And many people felt deeply betrayed by those nationalist narratives that their leaders had instilled in them. And this is the time when books like Lit and Straight, She's Eminent Victorians or 1066 and all that

are really kind of mocking the kind of drum and trumpet tone of Victorian culture. Post Second World War, we see lots of changes into the 60s that you talk about, and the beginnings of our culture war that we see today. But I'm really struck in your book, you say, in 1948, nearly 50% of Britons wanted to emigrate. And yet this is a period post-war that a lot of nostalgic people, actually on the left and the right, look back to and celebrate. And yet people at the time were thinking, this is rubbish, we want out. Well, it was a time of unbelievably rapid change. Even just the built environment, as towns and cities were regenerated and rebuilt after bomb damage during the war. All these kind of modernist schemes for the city centres of the future, new towns spilling into the countryside.

It's a time of huge change and people don't have the benefit of hindsight. don't have the benefit of hindsight. They didn't know that the never had it so good, the white heat of technology and all these things that we now know are on the way weren't to be taken for granted, I guess, in 1948, when many people were expressing the sense that like, oh, well, God, Europe's never going to recover. Best emigrate to the empire. That's where the future is. The Victorians, we had Jacob Rees-Mogg, who's a leading right-wing politician in this country, for everyone listening abroad, who have the huge pleasure in their lives of not knowing who Jacob Rees-Mogg is. He has written a giant book about the Victorians, Margaret Thatcher was keen on the Victorians. Why the Victorians for that on the right? Is that not just about hard

imperial power? It's about organising society as well, isn't it? It's a very particular perspective on Victorianism, because we could, for example, talk about the 19th century Tory party, the great age of social Toryism and emphasis on the aristocratic duty to care for the poor. People like Disraeli were enormously concerned about the ever widening gap between rich and poor. And there were lots of very nostalgic fantasies in the Victorian era about whether a kind of lost feudal order could be resurrected in a way where people could kind of overcome this laissez-faire spirit of industrialism. But actually, the Conservative Party today, and probably since Thatcher in the 1980s, the Victorianism they invoke is a liberal tale of self-help

and individualism, individual enterprising industrialists, people that pulled themselves up by the bootstraps. The Victorian, I think, kind of stands in their eyes as a word that's interchangeable with traditional quite often. Old is good. Yes. And there wasn't a nanny state. Old is good. Yes. And there wasn't a nanny state. What about today in Eastern Europe,

Orban, Putin, here in the UK and France, and obviously in the States? It's a golden age nostalgia at the moment, isn't it? You must have been having a field day. I don't know how you've finished this book because there are more and more examples every day of people appealing to some imagined past. Yeah, I mean, I didn't imagine the stakes would perhaps be quite so high when

I pitched it at the beginning of 2020 as a book idea. I really didn't expect that the Prime Minister would be kind of going out or cabinet ministers would be writing op-eds saying that historians are doing Britain down and that we're trying to tarnish the national narrative by highlighting what actually happened in the past. It's a very strange time to be a historian. History and nostalgia are two basically completely different things. One is almost like writing historical novels. It's perfectly, by all means, being nostalgic, but it has almost nothing to do with the forensic,

empirical study of the past, which is what you professional historians are doing. And I don't think the past is there to provide us with comfort. I think there is this strange idea in the media that history should be a thing that makes us feel good. And it's not clear to me why that should be the case, why we should accept that on the whole. It's a broad church, isn't it? The sum total of everything that's ever happened before. It would be very strange if we were supposed to kind of come out of wrestling with all the complexities of the past and go, oh yeah, I feel great now.

My dad read me Our Island Story when I was a kid, which was a kind of imperial tale of Britain's rise to greatness. And it's funny how powerful, I guess you've got generations of people brought up with, you're right, the point of history is to somehow make you feel good. And inspire you. But stories are moving and inspiring. These stories of history that we're often told, especially as children, we are very emotionally invested in them, but they are stories. You know, that's not the same as history as it's, for example, practiced in universities. And it would be strange if we insisted that there was no difference between those two narratives. In the present world, looking around us, what's the process by which you turn nostalgia into votes or certainly support or

passive support if you're in certain parts of the world? I think it's interesting that we have an idea that we should be taking lessons from history. People will often say, oh, if you don't know where you come from, you can't know where you're going. And there's a sense that if we learn about history, it will really empower us to make the correct decisions about the future but I think when it comes to nostalgia we can always kind of pick and choose the lessons that we learn so I'm thinking at the moment around lockdown restrictions and the Covid pandemic that there are two very different visions of what the blitz spirit means there. Politicians on one side will invoke the blitz spirit as like an object lesson in defiance. And they'll say, you know, they kept calm and carried on, apparently, in the war.

And, you know, we should do the same. And what that means is just pretend that COVID isn't happening. But actually, you can marshal a completely mutually exclusive rival vision of what the blitz spirit means. You could say, no, that was the wartime spirit of coming together and accepting collective sacrifice. And maybe that means masking up when you go into a shop or dialing back on your social events. You know, we can always marshal selective visions of the past to kind of win votes or win people to our agendas. So the other side, if you're a politician facing people, your opponents mobilising nostalgia, you just need different nostalgia. You just need to tell a different story about the past. I mean, to an extent, yeah. I think the problem is when one side is saying, everything's fine and great, past and present alike. Here is this wonderful, comforting narrative of glory. And actually the people that are encouraging you

to have a critical perspective on that are sinister Marxist ideologues. They're, in inverted commas, woke warriors, you know, undermining the freedom of Western civilization. We're in quite a dark place, really, with how history's been marshaled in the culture wars. And I'm not sure there is a clear answer to how you would counter that. But all we can do is try and encourage people to read history. Well, you've done that to me. Thank you very much. I love your

book and good luck with it. What's it called? Rural Nostalgia, A Backwards History of Britain. And it's at 26th of May Congratulations it's such a good book and good luck with it Thank you Thanks folks for listening to this episode of Danston's History

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And if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable, don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors. That's flying high on the charts. We've got our medieval podcast, Gone Medieval, with the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. We've got The Ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes. And we've got Warfare as well, dealing with all things military.

Please go and check those out wherever you get your pods. This is History's Heroes. please go and check those out wherever you get your pods. Look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.