Cast recommends podcasts. We love the story of Ireland's most notorious serial killer, had more questions than answers. That's where I'm trying to put the puzzle together. It just doesn't make sense, does it? The search for the real truth about Kieran Kelly continues. He always maintained that he had shoved him under the tree that nobody zone brought to you by Artie's documentary on one, concluding new episodes now available wherever you get your podcasts. Akehurst Power is the world's best podcast's, including the Dave MacWilliams podcast today and focus on the one you're listening to right now.

Hi, everybody, welcome to Dance News History it as we get ready for Christmas this year, our minds inevitably turn to Charles Dickens, the author that we associate with Christmas, its share, its hospitality, its warmth, its hot fruit punch. You'll have seen me in previous years nursing a gigantic hangover from the history hit Christmas Party, which was the night before cooking with the wonderful Penne Vogeler cooking Dickensian recipes. He was a huge, enthusiastic host and he was very particular about what he served as guests.

And so you can go and check that out on history, hit TV to laugh at the pain I'm in, but also revel in the Christmas Eve fare that Dickens would have produced. But this is a podcast about less about Christmas and more just about the man himself and his writing. I was really lucky to spend time with John Mullein. He's a professor of modern English literature at University College London. He just seems to know everything about 1890 literature and a lot of it.

So goodness knows what's inside that big brain. Is he one of the judges for the Man Booker Prize? He helped to launch the wonderful Hilary Mantel on her road to stardom. And it was just a great opportunity to sit down and talk about one of the greatest writers he's ever lived. Just a huge privilege. If you do want to go and check out the Dickensian Christmas filmon history hit TV. It's the new History Channel. We got hundreds of hours of documentary, hundreds of podcasts, me and all sorts of other people on there.

But he's got a history here, Doctor. I've used the code pod one PUDI one you get a month for free and the second one, which is one pound Eurodollars. And remember everybody, if you go to the shop shop dot history at dot com, you can gift that subscription to other people. You can buy a using knitted and Neitz hats or crocheted night tuts. I'm remaining above the fray on that one and you can buy one of our best selling history hoodies as well.

Nelson Richler. Third, it's all there. In the meantime, everyone enjoy John Mullein.

John, how are you? I'm fine, I'm fine, I've had my crunchy nut corn flakes, I'm okay.

Thank you for coming on the podcast, Crunchy, not corn Flakes.

Yeah, that gives me an artificial high for about 20 minutes.

You're darn right. I did that thing where I didn't let my kids know that they existed. And the other day I fed them to the nine year old and she looked at me just going, what?

You know, where to spend all my life? And I know that's irreversible, I'm afraid. And I have this list of things that I give her or that she comes to me Oreos, and I'm like, girl, I no, you know, this little Nishino, you know, what little does she know what's coming up on that list? My God, the trees that are in store. Anyway, thank you very much. Talking is Dickens the greatest novelist in the English language I think is the greatest sentence writer in the English language.

I don't think that's quite the same as the greatest novelist. He's one of the handful of greatest novelists. The thing about Dickens is that his virtues are also his vices. So he's not a he's not like Jane Austen, a kind of faultless novelist. He's a novelist who's full of excesses and sometimes things which irk even the most devoted Dickensian like myself. But he's also endlessly sort of a bewley and inventive. So, you know, you never know what the next sentence is going to be like.

And in that sense of kind of reading for excitement, he's the most exciting English novelist, I think. Yeah, I think that's interesting.

You say that the thing about the king is I mean, I find some of the coincidences a bit tiresome. You know, it emerges that, in fact, they are all related at the end of.

Yeah, I think that well, I said there's a chapter in my book which which is a sort of defense, not more than a defense, a sort of advocacy actually, of these coincidences, because actually most good novelists use coincidences, but usually they kind of smuggle them in. So, you know, Jane Eyre is full of coincidences in Middlemarch, tomes on George Eliot's full of courage. I mean, there's so much coincidence. But what Dickens does is he starts off, I think, early in his career, sort of falling back on coincidences in novels like Oliver Twist.

But then later on, he takes this kind of weakness of novels and makes it a sort of virtue. So there's a bit I don't for instance, there's a bit near the end of David Copperfield where David gets to visit as an adult, a model person.

And the model prison is run by his former headmaster, Mr. Kringle. And you think, oh, that's a bit of a coincidence, but maybe a satisfying one. It's the kind of thing he would do. And Mr. Grieco says at the end of the tour of this ghastly institution, oh, you must see our two model prisoners and they open the first door and there is Littermates, their fourth butler, sort of oozing respectability in a sinister way.

And then he says, well, this is our second most model prisoner. But the next door now, this guy really is a model prisoner and the door begins to open. You think I know it's going to be. And it's Uriah Heap, of course, whose habits of humility have recommended him to the prison authorities as being the top prison. And he comes out saying, I'm so grateful for being a prisoner. And it's the most absurd coincidence and the most brilliant coincidence because, of course, that's where those two people psychologically deserve to end up.

Yes, I know that. I give you that, that's for sure. But but, you know, you've got Mr. Mr. Mr Brownlow that turns out to be Oliver Twist grandfather in Oliver. And then and then obviously the gigantic coincidence in Tale of Two Cities as well. But but you're right. You forgive him more. They do say George Eliot because what he doesn't do as much as I always think with George Eliot, there's almost no problem in Georgia.

It couldn't be solved with a mobile phone or some contraception.

You know, there's less. Oh, if only we'd been at the bridge an hour earlier, we'd have avoided this whole great tragedy that subsequently unfolded. Well, I'm not sure that's fair to George Bailey.

I think George Eliot, the tragedies always happen because people don't understand each other.

That's why they happen. Okay, but but but I mean, the point is, they're very different kinds of writers on their own. And that Dickens, I think that you talked about Mr Brando and Oliver Twist. I think at that stage, you know, it's his second novel. He is still I mean, it's like a fable, isn't it's like a fairy tale. And he's using coincidences because he he has to to get it to work. But I think coincidence is one of those things that Dickens takes, which is and usually a sort of an error or a failure of taste of a kind of more polite writer and makes it a virtue.

And I think as one of the great things about him that he takes from cliches to repetition to coincidences, he takes all these things which writers aren't supposed to do and does them.

I agree, but can I ask them kind of big for the historians. This podcast, we're all fascinated. By Dickens as a 19th century observer and chronicler, as well as a writer of fiction and I picked up hard times are partly because it's the shortest Dickens novel, but also just is one that is just unbelievably powerful, talking about this new economy and the way it just absorbs and obliterates the lives of the characters in this Miltown cocktail.

I think it was called What Where Are We on Dickens's Politics, on the importance of of time and place for Dickens as a writer?

Well, I think that the time and place ness for historians gets sort of less specific as through his career, in a way.

So in Oliver Twist, he's writing about reforms to the poor law of a specific kind which have just gone through parliament in Nicholas Nickleby. He's writing about these terrible Yorkshire schools, which actually existed at the time.

And I always think, you know, his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, begins with a sentence which sort of I think represents where he got to, where he says in these times of ours, though, concerning the exact year, there's no need to be precise.

Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. And so he becomes a writer of these times of ours, but not of a specific year or specific kind of political arguments that are going on.

And even in hard times, it seems to me, as a kind of brilliant, bleak satire on what always got his goat most, which was the sort of brilliant rationals schemes of managers and politicians and reformers. And actually often I think I don't think Dickens he was more radical when he was younger, but by his middle age, he wasn't really politically radical because he often thought that the worst things happened when people had brilliant ideas for reforms to make things better.

And they sat around in committees and they'd all read Jeremy Bentham and or Mugs Guide to Jeremy Bentham. And they had a great idea of how to solve things. And that actually Dickens often thought was the most dangerous thing of all.

Yeah. And you see, that was sort of on painfully undoing and learning so many of the lessons of the 19th century or so many decisions made, whether it's filling up our atmosphere with carbon or draining the Fens or whatever it might be. And I think that Dickens feels quite modern in that way. And also his tale of Two Cities feels fairly patriotic in a in a sort of small C conservative Anglophile way, doesn't it? Yeah, it is.

It is. I mean, it. But it's a question. A big question. Sorry. No, no, it's I mean, it is.

But also, you know, it is in some ways a bleakly conservative novel because it's an account of what happens when a combination of the cruelty of traditional hierarchy and the kind of Leninist schemes of a few radicals combine.

I don't think Dickens thought of it as a sort of that that was a French ailment alone. I mean, I think he thought it was a human ailment. Yeah.

I find those scenes in Soho curiously comforting, though. When he builds this, you get a sense. You do.

There's a there's a there's a whiff of this set to dial and sort of exceptionalism of the happy, the happy way that jolly England has gone in those in those little chapters. It feels so safe and comfortable.

Yeah. I mean, it is an historical novel, isn't it? And yeah, I think he thinks that in a sort of Dr Johnson like way that British sort of truculence and irreverence are kind of national virtues which might preserve us from the horrors of revolution.

Yeah. And again, he pressures the 20th century and you read about whether it's the Russian Revolution, the Iranian revolution, or just left with the profound sense that you wish that all everyone could have lost.

And and that, of course, he gives a brilliantly articulate start with the evil aristocracy in France.

Of course. I mean, he gets it. You know, he gets a lot of it from Thomas Carlyle, whom he he loves and admires. And I think that Dickens thought that A Tale of Two Cities was to some extent a novelization of what Carlyle had taught everybody. And one of the kind of weird, interesting things is, of course, Carlile's French Revolution, which I don't think is read much anymore because it's so vast. But it's difficult to sort of overemphasize how admired it was in his own day.

And one of the weird things about. It is like a Hilary Mantel novel, it's written in the present tense and extraordinary, no historical narrative had been like this before. So if you're living in our day to day and Dickens nicked to that, too. So one of the things that he introduced to his novels, most famously Bleak House, I guess, was sort of interleaving narrative in the past tense, where you're standing above it all and you understand what is happening because you're looking back and narrative chapters in the present tense where it's all just unfolding without a pattern, accidentally, randomly.

And he got that from Carlisle.

That's that's fascinating. Again, talking about the place that he occupied, was it within history? You mentioned he became less radical as you got older. We believe David Copperfield is the most biographical novel. Is that a cliche?

And no, I think that's actually true because Dickens and Dickens admitted it was. And, you know, when he wrote his other semi well, there's bits of his life, of course, in other things like the debtor's prison and Little Dorrit. But Great Expectations, his other wholly first person novel went when he sat down to write it before he wrote it. He reread David Copperfield to try and save himself from replicating these kind of autobiographical elements, which he knew he'd put in David Copperfield.

So, you know, after all, it's the story of somebody who becomes a novelist. Exactly.

But but also the story of someone who now that you mention it becomes a little bit more, I think, a little bit more establishment. He loses because his childhood is so unbelievably crap. And he you know, he works in the bottom five. He absolutely works in the most grinding conditions. And he's shafted by the kind of intellectual that the educational establishment is sent to, very traditional. And yet Copperfield doesn't it doesn't seem to carry that radicalism or that trauma through to his the last few chapters, which feel he feels very content.

And I wonder if that's that also reflects Dickens's journey.

Mm. I don't know, because, you know, I was comparing it to great expectations. And the striking thing about that novel, which I think is a wonderful, wonderful book, is but it's the opposite of what you've just sat through.

It's a novel whose protagonist, you know, crawls up, climbs up, is obsessed with social mobility, gets a kind of bequest from out of nowhere, which he misinterprets, which is going to make him a gentleman. But the whole novel is looking back with kind of, you know, really sort of sometimes crippling self condemnation about the illusions of social mobility. It's a novel about apparent social mobility, and that's clearly as true a novel for Dickens as David Copperfield was.

So I think it is the case. You know, Dickens is the most self-made great novelist in the English in Britain anyway, writing in Britain ever. And that is really important to the way he writes and really crucial. He was proud of that. You know, he was proud of that.

So you might say David Copperfield reflects that the capacity to sort of win through by dint of your own energy and talent.

And Dickens had the attitude to sort of money and possessions and things of somebody who came from that background. Never has earning money been more important to a great writer, but it was all because.

And yet he satirises, of course, throughout his fiction, the obsession with wealth and money.

But that's a natural paradox because he felt that he got it all for himself.

And then his descriptions of have become famous, obviously, of Christmas's, but also of hospitality, of food, of drink, of companionship. They feel so important in Dickens novels. And is that is that a product of someone who grew up without those material comforts? Yes, I think it is.

And I think it's the product of somebody for whom those comforts were really a big deal throughout his life. You know, sometimes my students say to me, what did he spend his money on? And apart from spending it on, his various feckless relatives who knew had to sustain, he spent a lot of it on hospitality. It might be worth saying at a time when Dickens, the person, is rather stand's rather low in public repute. I think that if you knew him, you were the beneficiary of the greatest parties, evenings, dinners that anybody could enjoy.

And that was a really big thing for him. He was always having parties really in the grand style and of course for his children and so on, but actually for a huge kind of community of of friends and acquaintances. And then he would end the party at 2:00 in the morning and walk to Rochester from London. You know, speaking of those parties.

I've often thought, you know, when people ask you your ideal historical dinner party, you're supposed to say, you know, Julius Caesar and Karl Marx and Socrates. Yes, Socrates. But surely the answer is actually a real dinner party that did take place in 19th century England, where Dickens and a few of his mates all got round. I mean, there must have been some real dinner parties that actually are the best ever.

Yes, absolutely.

Absolutely. And usually and I mean, if that's your predilection, usually ending with either games or amateur dramatics or conjuring, you know, Dickens, I just didn't know when I started writing my book. But Dickens was a very accomplished amateur conjurer and his favorite. No, really, he was really, really good because, you know, as an historian, you might know it became it was a big fashion from about the 18 30s or 40s in London, was live magicians on the stage and a whole new generation of sort of nascent.

Paul Daniels disappeared. They were often from Europe and they came and they were big attraction. And Dickens went to see conjurers in London and he was intoxicated and he learned some of the tricks himself. And his big party piece was putting all the ingredients for a Christmas pudding into a big top hat and pulling out a steaming pudding.

And Carl's wife, Jane Carlyle, saw him doing this at some house party on the Isle of Wight and said he's better than these guys on the stage, is better than the pros. He was very, very good at that.

So you might get that, you know, so it wasn't a question of sitting around having elevated conversation. It was entertainment all the way.

You're listening to history hit John Marlinspike talking about Dickens.

After this, Akehurst recommends podcasts.

We love the story of Ireland's most notorious serial killer. Had more questions than answers. That's why I'm trying to put the puzzle together. It just doesn't make sense, does it? The search for the real truth about Kieran Kelly continues. He always maintained that he had shoved him under the tree that nobody so brought to you by Arties documentary on one.

Concluding new episodes is now available wherever you get your podcasts. Akehurst Power is the world's best podcast's, including the Dave MacWilliams podcast today in focus on the one you're listening to right now.

Speaking of entertainment, how how should we think about Dickens's but I mean, we've famously told they were serialized, they were sort of cliffhangers. This was soap opera for the victory. I mean, who was reading, buying? I mean, how educated were these people? Was it was that were they the elites? Were they genuinely everybody? Or whether this new artisanal class with a few pennies to spend, like, who's this? Who's this audience?

I think you got it right. A new artisanal class with pennies to spare is probably quite a good way of getting it. I mean, he did, as you say, pioneered these forms of serialisation weekly or monthly, and that meant that things sold much more cheaply over a much longer period.

And he slightly to the disdain of some of his contemporaries, he sold as nobody'd ever sold before. And that was really important to him. But it's still the case that the majority of his readers were what we might now call middle class, or quite a lot of them would be lower middle class. You know, they were clerks rather than lawyers who were buying these things and of course, reading them aloud because they were written to be read a lot.

So lots of people became familiar with his stories, I think, particularly in week when they were in the weekly versions, you know, Great Expectations published weekly, a penny a copy of all the around. Quite a lot of people could afford that and maybe read it aloud in the pub or something, you know, and actually, Great Expectations features as a scene where a character is reading aloud from the paper in the pub.

And so it did reach down a long way. You know, these things rather like nowadays people think they often know Dickens stories without having read them. They were also put on stage, adapted in cheap forms. So the knowledge of something like Oliver Twist percolated a long way down. But yeah, I mean, most of the readers were still people who had at least some money to spare to buy entertainment.

And so that's a really interesting commentary read aloud. Have you have you then presumably listen to them all aloud. What do you get different when you when you read them to when you listen to them?

There are things which you sort of if you're a good reader, notice without reading aloud, but which are really much clearer when you do so little things. OK, one of the things Dickens became a great, I think artist of was people's voices, characters, voices, what linguists call idiolect. So everybody has their own voice.

And we know that when he wrote, he sort of practised these you know, he practised the looks in front of the mirror, but he also practised the voices. And you can sort of see that on the page, sort of.

But once you have to perform it, you can hear it really, really clearly when you do. Mr. Dorret, William Dorret, with his endless sort of fake ethic, all sorts of little hesitations and qualifications and his hums and hard is I think there are many nineteenth century novelists who include the way people talk, the little noises they make, which aren't even words, homes and cars and coughs.

And he's writing as if it's a musical score for you, for him to perform, but for anybody to perform. So, I mean, that's that's one example. I think quite a lot of other ones. He he writes rhythms of sort of repetition, which which, when you look at them, seem to be kind of rather kind of crude, but then when you perform them make perfect sense. Yeah.

And obviously you mentioned Uriah Heap or Mr Corba. There's so many wonderful example. Yes. Yes. What is your what is your favorite Dickens novel.

Well, I guess it's it's not a very original answer, my favorite ones, great expectations. Now, just why? Because that is the one that is the perfect one. It's a novel also seems to me to perfectly combine the two things that Dickens was really good at combining, which was, I don't know, scariness and laughter. Anyway, so one of his talents was not just making you laugh. I think he's the funniest great novelist that I know of, but make you laugh when you shouldn't laugh, you know, make you laugh when when somebody is dying.

Oh, and Great Expectations is brilliant at combining the terrors of childhood with the absurdities of childhood, you know, and that's that's just just incredible.

But with also I mean, three or four of the greatest characters in an English Haversham, obviously stellar. I was obsessed. Costello when I was a kid. She was she was so scared. I felt very like she was both extraordinarily glamorous and unattainable, but also just like a bully and horrible and scary and just a perfectly sums up the experience of unconfident young boys, you know?

And then obviously, Joe, the scene where Joe comes to visit him in London, he rejects Joe is one of the great scenes of literature. I can't stand it.

I know. I know. It's painful and it's brilliant. Joe keeps moving between calling him sir and calling him.

Oh, and he doesn't. And he keeps places down. Isn't going to put it.

Yes, it is absolutely painful. But that is you're right. I mean, that is something that that seems incredibly familiar. It doesn't seem a Victorian novel, does it. And it seems a novel about the pains and self-delusion sort of growing up. And as you say, the the absolute sort of self punishing fantasies about women that he has. You know, I find brilliant the one with him. And Betty, that is so when it's really, really obvious that Betty loves him.

But the best bit of all, the best bet is when having finally realized he's not going to get Estella, he goes, oh, God, what am I going to do? And he does that thing, which men do, I'm afraid, which, you know, look at the last name on your object, on your address.

And he goes, Oh, Betty. Yeah, Betty. Actually, I quite like Betty. Yeah. And she was pretty keen on me. Oh, I'll go and get I'll marry her. And he goes back home to Kent and he meets her and he's just about to say something and she says, Oh, I'm so glad you've come. You've timed it really well because this is my wedding day. Isn't that wonderful?

It's it's what well-deserved. But and also, as you say, the ridiculousness of material wealth, of social status and the whole irony of it being based on a convict's ill gotten gains. Yeah, well, I actually don't know what's so fascinating about it is that actually the convict well. Does not suffer in Australia. Yes, he did. But unlike unlike these ridiculous families around him, no doubt will their wealth comes from sort of general renting and rent seeking and slave owning.

Magwitch makes an honest man of himself and makes lots of money.

So he does. It does. And of course, Pep's horror and disgust at the source of his wealth, you know, is really bad. I mean, he's the hero who most dislikes himself in nineteenth century fiction. He read so much. So I think sometimes the reader goes, hey, you know, you're being too hard on yourself here. But, yeah, he's disgusted by the taint of crime, isn't he? I mean, it's a brilliantly plotted novel.

That's the other reason. I think it's my favourite. It's the most beautifully plotted novel of all of this.

I mean, I must say, though, I have a coming of age story, which is a tale of two cities. I was on a family holiday when I was a kid, five weeks with my mum and dad camping some hellishness. And I was a teenager. I want to be there. And I was forced to be totally citizen. I didn't I didn't really understand huge chunks of it, but I thought I should read it because I wanted to and I wanted to be thought of as clever and everything.

And then I understood enough of it. And then my mum found me crying at the end of the book, came around the corner campsite and I was lying on the ground in tears. And she was so happy because this kind of really unresponsive teenage lump of fourteen year old boy, she had been worried that I was a sort of lost case. And then she just found me weeping at the end of town statistics, which is just unbelievably beautiful.

And what Dickens would have been really delighted to have seen you in a pool of tears, because that's why, in a way, apart from the fact that he made lots of money by he that he went in for these live readings in the last sort of decade or so of his life because he wanted to see the kind of visceral impact or hear it, you know. He wanted to hear everybody roaring with laughter, he wanted to see people appalled at Sykes beating Nancy to death, and he wanted to see people crying as well.

The young dance, now reduced to blubbering, would have been a sure index of his powers as a novelist.

Yeah, well, he would be disappointed that I pursued 18th century history rather than 18th century literature. But although you're making me want to go back and do an adult learning course in there, you don't have to do a course.

Just pick up the novels. That's the brilliance. That's right.

It's such a huge, joyful thing. The last I've got, actually. I know. I want to ask you about Hilary Mantel, who you brilliantly spotted her talent so early on. But just to ask this, because you're such an expert on Austen as well, who I'm obsessed with water Austin and coming to us as the historian, what Austen and Dickens tell us about Englishness, about Britishness, and are they sort of tangibly different to what is going on elsewhere on the continent?

God, sorry, I got you. I've got you. I need to ask any questions I always think about, okay, sorry about this. I don't know. This is perhaps you might you might find this not a good answer, not a proper answer to your question. But but I think about what do they have in common because they are so different as writers, you know, they're almost opposites. But one thing they have in common is they show the incredible sort of accessibility of the English language to those, at least within novels, who want to do something really, really new.

I mean, we're talking about Dickens is education or lack of it. Earlier, what Dickens and Austin have in common is they're both in different ways, real sort of outside. Why should these two become two of the greatest writers in British history that had said three and a half years education between them, actually, and what they have in common is that sort of extraordinary capacity to think that they can do things within fiction that nobody's done before and they don't have to go to do a course.

They don't have to have expert writers tell them how to do it. And they can sort of epitomise and satirize the vices and follies of their own day and make them devices and follies of every day and that demonstrate incredible sort of creative self-confidence that they shared. I don't know if that is in itself a peculiarly English thing or not, but I think it might have something to do with the powers and resources of the English language a bit. But I would find that, you know, it's a difficult case to argue, but I, I sort of feel it's there to be argued.

I mean, I must if you allow me, I'd love to do a podcast on Jane Austen. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. She's a goddess. Yes. Absolutely must. Absolutely remarkable. So and lastly, speaking of goddesses, you were on the Man Booker Prize. Hilary Mantel won it for the first time. I was. I imagine that was not hard. You didn't spend much time deliberating. I mean, it was.

AU contraire. Oh, really? Oh, goodness.

Oh, it was. I mean, I don't think I broke any confidences when I say it was a split jury. I think is it very often is because one of the panel, I think one of the panel did write a newspaper article about it afterwards in which she spilled some of the beans. So it was no, it was a majority vote, as I think it frequently is. And it was down to Woelfel vs. one other novel in the end.

But, you know, we were in there. They they shut you in a room with sort of, you know, mineral water and fruit.

There's a kind of incentive to get it done. Dickens really hated that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you've done this. You've done the the booker. Yes. No, never. No, no, no. You well, OK. Well, I warn you, you get wined and dined until the last day and then you get mineral water and fruit and no, it was it was a hard argued thing and it was a vote in the end.

So if I had thought differently, it would have been a different decision.

You were the swing justice. That's very exciting.

I was meshuga. No, I was Pennsylvania. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I was. But I have to say, there wasn't any doubt for me personally. I didn't think I didn't go into the last one. We got the short list. I didn't go into that last meeting knowing that Woelfel was going to win. I knew that if push came to shove, I would vote for it as the best one. But I didn't know what the other judges would do.

I think I think the trilogy is one of unspeakable brilliance. And I'm not in a French Revolution book as well. Yes, I feel so excited to be alive at the same time, sir, where do you think we will see Mantell in the great pantheon of British writers?

Well, that's very hard to say, but I think that, you know, in fifty years time, Dr Johnson, you say you have to wait 100 years, but maybe 50 nowadays. I think people will still be reading and talking about her books, but maybe sort of overall, because the thing about I mean, I'm not you know, it's my job to read novels and very happy fate that I have. And when Warhol came out, you know, I'd already read all her other novels and they were all different from each other.

There was a place of greater safety, the historical one. There's one called the John O'Brien, which is historical in a very strange way. But her other novels weren't historical novels and they all so dissimilar. And she's a very she's a wonderful and strange and very various writer. And I think that will sustain her actually, because they'll come a time when people will go, oh, they'll say wrong. The Thomas Cromwell trilogy, that was a that was a phase of the day, but she's got lots of other strings to her bow, and I think that will mean that people will, I hope, kind of continue to read all her novels, not just these ones, which are the flavor of our decade.

It's the way that she put references in to extremely, extremely niche, historical, you know, the way the way that Cromwell would think back on on the wars of the roses and make very obscure references like the Battle of San Orbanes. You're thinking how many people reading this? I mean, as it happens, this is right in my wheelhouse. But like, it's wonderful. It's so extraordinary and really exciting and everyone can access it. And yet it's just got so many other layers underneath it for those who really wish to get to that level.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's incredible how she does that thing that she takes sort of the best known story in all British history. As my younger daughter said, we're doing The Tudors again, the best known story. And when you're reading it is sort of almost you don't know what's going to happen next to to put the sort of the danger and the provisional ality and the chance in this back into those events.

Only a novelist could sort of do that. I think that's extraordinary.

Well, historians out there, there's the stories out there gritting their teeth at the moment. But you're right, who should we be reading at the moment? Since your job is to read novels? Bear in mind we got historic history fans listening to this. But so who should we all go and read at the moment?

Oh, gosh. You mean somebody who's publishing books right now? New novels? Yeah, I'm not sure I have an answer to that because they're not on or near lock down, I'm afraid, time. What I've done is I've gone back to things and I absolutely please no novels about pandemics. Thank you very much.

Well, what's so fascinating, I'm sure you found, is that you start to reread novels or things the past and you realize that the pandemics are always lurking there in plain sight.

And in fact, Hilary Mantel, they spent the whole time to avoid the sweating sickness. And I was reading that the writing is fascinating.

Yeah, I suppose of living novelists, the one whose next novel, I will really look forward to reading, which will be out, I imagine quite soon is Kayseri, Suguru. So I know that's a safe choice. He's won the Nobel Prize, but I find his novels really haunting and and sort of endlessly rewritable. You know, he he takes sort of six or seven years over each one and he's got one on the way, which will publish quite soon, I think.

And that's what I'll really relish.

They're worth the wait. Thank you very much.

Speaking of books that we should read, tell us what your book is called. My book is called The Artful Dickins, rather good title thought of by somebody in a meeting at the publisher's brilliant.

Well, for Dickens. Go and get everybody. John Mullins, thank you so much. Pleasure.

Helen. Allow us to create a strong bond in the history of our country. Paul. And I hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go, a bit of a favor to ask, totally understand. If you want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash, money makes sense. But if you could just do me a favor, it's for free. Go to iTunes or have you get your podcast. If you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review package yourself, give it a glowing review.

I'd really appreciate that. Tough. Well, the law of the jungle out there and I need all the fire support I can get, so that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome. But if you could do, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.