she was very vulnerable. with the help of her husband who was tremendously supporting and was a particularly vulnerable phase she was very fragile when she finished a book. she suffered from a lack of confidence, she always felt depressed but she never realized. she was writing her own a bit of life writing, a memoir of her childhood partly to get away with the presence of the war. she was trying to go back in her mind finding reading a very upsettinndf things were

happening at that time and she felt the onset of would be called madness and there are many different interpretations of why she killed herself at that point. i think she felt that at that time in britain at that time she would be a terrible burden if she were to go mad in the middle of the war and she felt she couldn't do that to him but she also took a cogent decision at that point. she was 59 and, she was an old. people forget that she was 59. its young.

she would avert an extraordinary things if she had survived. ischemic where did the phrase who is afraid of virginia woolf come from? >> i think edward invented it for his play and he saw it in the restroom of a bar somewhere. this is the story that goes into the play who is afraid of the big bad wolf? she is a rather successful academic and was ambitious and aggressive and that sums up the whole world of culture.

when i was working on the book, and she's a major figure to work on. i thought the question is i am. >> we have been talking with hermione lee on book tv here in london. thank you for your time. >> thank you. >> now from london book tv interviewed charnel emmerson author of two books, 1913 in search of the world view this is about half an hour. booktv is pleased to have with us charles emmerson has written a couple bucks his most recent

1913 in search of the world before the great war just coming out this year. mr. emmerson, what was the world like in 1913, and i know that is a generic question. >> the short answer is the world was a lot more today than likely it tend to think it was highly globalized and very modern. we tend to think of the world in europe to look at through the prism of first world war. we tend to look at it in black-and-white or sepia so while trying to do with the book is to bring back the color if you like as it appeared to be the people at that time. >> how do you approach 1913 in your book? >> by traveling around the world which is what people could do in 1913 so i'll get 23 different cities around the world stag

in londo the world, the centrall finance and then traveling first-round in europe and then more widely to the united states, mexico and places which are off the beach and track to winnipeg, shanghai, tokyo, bombay etc. and then coming back so there is one way of looking at this book is really a tour of the world. >> use a london was a financial capital of the world. it's 2013. where is london today? >> the financial capital of the world. there is something else about 1913 in that it's the capitol of a great empire and it's entirely disappeared but that is one of the interesting parallels there or in the book between 1913 and now and it's a cosmopolitan city

and free global said the. it's a cosmopolitan city now. in 19 it's about wall street. many of those states eco pretty powerfully today between wall street and main street. >> what about china what was it like in 1913? >> it's been one of the most fascinating things to me an undertaking the research of this book. it's important for us now to understand how much through all the 19th century and early 20th century china was besieged by the west. there's a wonderful photograph i have of u.s. marines inside the soviet and this period of history is i think forgotten to

some degree in the west but it's tremendously important in today's china but it's this honoring that state if you like. it's very much aware of but as you move closer to 1913, you have a revolution of 1911 and a bit of a civil war but you also get a sense of the chinese reawakening the dragon that has been slumbering and we awakened in 1913 so there is the sense of the unquestioned dominance is coming to an end. >> you shall the warning signs that you see. >> it's impossible not to see

parallels. one should never assume that because it never is but sometimes these things rise and i think 2013 rhymes with 1913 to some degree. there are obvious parallels in terms of a hegemonic power of the united kingdom in 1913 which is a decline and the similarities to the united states. they are not fit in the exact trajectories of the country's but more of a general idea in 1913 you are at the end of the period when there's been european and specifically british political dominance and that is allowed for a degree of globalization etc. and in 2013 you had a long period of american hegemony or pre-eminence the future becomes

uncertain. you enter into a period of the competitive if you liked and there's more open questions about how the future will then play out. >> tv answer the questions in the book? this is a history book and above all it is the way though world looked and i don't want to preempt too much the geopolitical analysis one can make for the present-day. >> you also visited canada. why did you include those nations? >> i included winnipeg i don't think many more americans now view it as being there but if you go to winnipeg now you see

splendid buildings that are put up around the state in a hotel called fortenberry that's very grand and a tremendously large scale one has a sense of tremendous confidence about the future and indeed winnipeg was one of the fastest-growing cities in the british empire. the idea is the future was very much winnipeg's to take. you go to delete from go there now and don't get the same feeling. it was a high point, but i think it's important to remind oneself periods of time in the past and expectations of a future would be the great capital of the prairie, people are very confident about these things and they turn out to be somewhat misplaced.

>> i choose to look at bombay in that year and of course it is part of the british empire through the linchpin of the british empire tremendously important economically, tremendously important politically. really india is to a large degree the british empire and the bombay is the most imperial city, tremendous confluence of people in the city at that time. so i am trying to uncover what the city was like and what the entire meant at that time. one of the interesting things about it is that you discover that india or the entire is not just about the colonizers. there is a degree of participation in the empire by indians themselves and i think also one thing that comes out of that is the extent to which india itself was participating in also becoming more modern in

1913 as you get the first indian feature-length movie that you can look at online which is rather special. >> charles emmerson, 1913 the next year began, the first world war. do you see 2013 moving ann direction? >> no i think that is going too far, that is too strong of a parallel between the two years. what i do think, however, is the certainty that we have grown up with, the certainty of western dominance if you liked, the certainty of the globalization to the extent that is an experienced certainty we need to understand they are rather contingent with a man not necessarily continue forever.

again, looking back to 1913 you see expectations that the future the world would be integrated economically and would be more integrated in terms of people coming around with the forces of technology drawling the world together and these great forces of history which nothing could conceivably knock off course and get in 1914 they were. and that is a lesson if you like in fragility. "1913: in search of the world before the great war," prior to that the future of the arctic came out. is there a connection in these books? >> me pit that is a facetious answer in some respects but it's true both of these books while being different for me in a different way of looking at the world trying to approach the

world a little bit from the slide from that angle in the case of 1913 it's very much trying to recover a generation that is rather lost in our understanding for the first world war is to try to understand an area of the world for the longest time was considered not tremendously important. there is an awful lot going on and we have to rethink everything we thought we knew about that part of the globe. for me the most exciting thing as a writer is to be able to use the words come to the will to use research to look at the world a new? >> in terms of the state's huge

but the russians, the americans, the canadians. >> they are a slice of the arctic. there are some questions about exactly where the slices overlap and where the line should be drawn in some places that isn't entirely clear but the arctic is more or less earned apart from. there is an area around the north pole that might be by humanity. but that isn't defined as yet the different states are preparing to the claims. >> is there going to be a treaty on splitting of the arctic? >> no, that's not really necessary because there is a convention which more or less sets the constitution and that

more or less defines how at least the states should determine. >> why would the arctic become a political football or resource? >> one of the reasons it is changing very differently with energy companies in the area there's a lot more going on now than was the case. in terms of conflicts between states i think what we are seeing is a tremendous degree of cooperation so i am quite pleased on the geopolitical level at least there is an understanding on the part of the countries that the need to work

not always easy when it comes to the military questions i think in particular there are challenges and trust deficits to overcome. but broadly i think the general trust of the development politically is quite positive. >> what are some of the resources in the arctic? >> lots of oil and gas for a start and green land also uranium, gold, pretty much everything you can think of is likely to be in the arctic and because it is under unexplored there is the chance that quite a lot of substances will be discovered but getting that this is very difficult and expensive. there are lots of environmental risks associated with it. so the fact that it's there doesn't necessarily imply that it will be produced. >> with the militarization of the arctic?

has that happened? >> welford years ago in the height of the cold war there were probably more than there are now so what you have seen is it is important militarily because it's a good place for the submarines to hide to destroy russia or the united states or london. now that area is over so that kind of military infrastructure is no longer necessary in the arctic but we have also returned from the period in the 1990's when the arctic was completely off the map. there wasn't much going on economically and it wasn't considered a prayer ready politically or militarily. because there is more interest in oil and gas and the possibility of shipping across the arctic because the areas have greater access to eight

there is a great need for defense militaries to look again at what they should have in place in case of the worst-case scenario but even not that to deal with issues what if a ship goes down, one of the cruise ship runs aground or there is an oil spill so the military and the governments are beginning to look again but we shouldn't view this much as militarization. in some respects having some military infrastructure is a good thing because it allows the states to do with the need to do which is to show that they are in control and show that they have the capability to show the sovereign power. estimate has there been conflict over the use in the last ten years? >> a lot of the conflict is within the states. you think about for example in the united states the question

of whether or not to differ with the gas resources in the whether in offshore alaska that is a tremendously high octane political issue in washington and has been for years. it is vital national security for these resources to be developed and such little change, the price of gas at the pump for the american consumer. so a lot of these debates that are powerful have been not between the arctic states but actually within them in the politics. >> what about private investments in the arctic? >> that's going up very, very quickly. in the oil and gas companies around what it may be for them to invest if you look at the russian arcia deal

man the last 18 months where the companies are looking to invest in the russian arctic and the government is very keen to allow those companies to come in to invest and to develop oil and gas resources. the figures bandied around are very large. there was one a quote from vladimir putin i think he used a figure of four or $5 billion over a period of decades so there are potentially very big numbers in terms of money to be invested and of course, if that comes off that is bound to change the economic importance of the arctic and the strategic influence of the arctic. in the 20 or the 30 years' time we will see the ships going across the top of the north pole

taking goods between asia and europe and may be slightly further out in terms of the time but these things are now conceivable in a way that they were really dreams just a few years ago. >> what are some of the environmental changes that you have noted in your book about the arctic? >> need to realize just how much has changed. people will say we used to be yoel to pond from the ice and we used to be able to go miles out with no fear at all of the icebreaking and now the period is much shorter and we are uncertain about whether it will carry our weight and it will hold. so there are those anecdotal bits of evidence which i think are very powerful because there are some people who live in the

arctic year in and out but there is the big picture stuff that is picked up by satellites, and again if you look at the web site, the national oceanographic administration, you will see this extraordinary time lapse or satellite imagery of the reduction of the arctic over a number of years and it is quite striking freezes up and it melts in the summer. but in general each summer it melts a little bit more and doesn't freeze up quite as much in the previous winter and did you get the sense that the arctic ice islam slowly or in some places quickly disappearing and the question is what your in

the summer will there be no ice at all. when i started working on these issues the answer to that question tended to be maybe 2060, 2070. and as i worked on this issue over the years, that sort of consensus estimate has come down 2014 colin 2030 come some people even say that it could happen as early as 2020. so there is the sense that part of the world we've always considered to be frozen, and changing and yet it is changing on our watch before our eyes and your lifetime and that is a fairly remarkable thing to see. >> is it dangerous? >> is it dangerous to the global? yes it certainly is. just how dangerous, we doase the

arctic becomes more open a few light as the ice disappears, that tends to accelerate the process of global warming so it is a contributor if you liked to global warming which is my understanding the scientific process is important. >> we are talking in london with charles emmerson author of the book "1913: in search of the world before war world came out and the future of the arctic. where did you get the name future history of the arctic? >> my first love is history and you need to understand the past it to understand the future. that is one reason why i have

written "1913." and this seemed not to just present a vision of what might be like 20 or 30 years from now but to try to understand where we've come from over the last century. what's changed, what is the history? what is the reason for them being the way they are now? so form ta historical investigations understanding y russia does this attachment and why the russians states has a particular attachment to the emotionally historic the understanding all those things to my mind is key to then projecting forward to understand how things change in the future. >> are there the same issues dealing with the antarctic? >> the climate changes or themselves different. but also politically.

in the arctic you have the city surrounded by land. in the article you have essentially this big area of land which no one owns. but there again there are questions for not the immediate future but 40 or 50 years out. there is no economic exploitation but in 40 or 50 years' time will the companies be lurking there? >> there is a treaty that bans such things but will that hold? >> it is not owned by any state. they are held and suspended for the duration of the treaty but

in 40 or 50 years of time will the treaty still be there and will those planes and the fact deactivated, what happens? >> have you visited the arctic? >> i have been there many times. >> tell us what experience. >> well, it's cold. the first time i went there i was ten, 11, 12-years-old. we were visiting stockholm and i don't know quite how but i managed to persuade her what we really needed to do was to get on a train and had across the circle to head north. so we got on this train and eventually i fell asleep and i woke up the next morning and i

said have been crossed the arctic circle? what amount to see if anything was different, which it wasn't. it was a fairly monotonous landscape outside and yes we crossed the arctic circle. of course they have been back many times. my favorite place is probably green land, the most remarkable place to go to and i was told by a colleague of mine the best view in marine land is just after you've landed. >> he said walked ahead and look at the faces of the other people

getting off the plane. so they ran ahead and turn around. so they come off the plane behind me and have this kind of glow about them and these extraordinary landscapes of space and all of them their faces just glowed. they had a tremendous look about them because the arctic is in many places very special and respond to it. ..