you had two painters, you had a writer which meant you could , through self against the wire of the campaign was shot down in the german camp. cover british cultural life at least in some political life through these lives. >> how much coordination was it also meant that i could cover there between those generals? almost a century and see how >> there was in many ways rather things had changed there. too little and in some ways >> host: judith flanders, you rather too much. mentioned that you were a publisher. montgomery was insufferable. >> guest: i was. >> host: where? >> guest: ooh, lots of places. i worked, i worked for penguin, it has been said. i worked for -- he was never getting enough [inaudible] and hudson who publish art affirmation see. books, i worked for a publisher i think that if anything named nicholson, i even very eisenhower was far too tolerant briefly worked in the of montgomery. publications department of a he did put his foot down. the key moments. museum. but there was no direct and then i fled. relationship until after the end >> host: why? of the war. >> guest: i think because i had a nervous breakdown. actually, he then became an publishing, great stuff. object of obsession because the [laughter] gone on so well. the things got difficult, and so i thought, great, time for a and he said, no, because of his change. >> host: and you started popularity, he might actually becoming ap author.

>> guest: yeah. prove a threat. i took three weeks holiday, and he had accused partizan. i went to the library, and i did >> what is that? research on these women, and i >> that he might be a military wrote a proposal, and i called a dictator -- dictator like napoleon bonaparte. couple of agents i knew and, of gives you an idea of hell. course, i was in an enormously artie was. he used the -- their rig during privileged position that i could just call up agents because i knew them and said you may want to think with horror at the the autopsy, and kenya this idea, but i've written this committee was still being up the proposal are, do you want to look at it? and one of the agents said he wanted to take me on, and he commander-in-chief in berlin accusing him of failing to find said the best advice anyone ever the body of father. he was playing a double game. gives an author, don't give up he did not find out that the the day job. body had been found until 1965, so i gave up the day job. 20 years later. and here i am. >> when you say hitler's body, >> host: we've heard that from a exactly what was left? couple of the authors here in london that we've interviewed >> well, hitler, the bodies were that it's hard to be in england carried upstairs and then there a writer solely. you have to be a writer and x. were sprinkled in petrol and set on fire. >> guest: yeah. it's very difficult. that was quite interesting. you have to remember apart from interviewed a number of years ago, interviewed. anything else about the changing one of the ss guards, they had economic climate, the changing

been drinking heavily upstairs reading habits just the sheer came stumbling down the stairs. population difference in our two a, do you want to come and have countries and, therefore, the a look. sheer number of people who will anyway commanders body was buy books even if you to well. burned, but he was still recognizable. the team managed to track down 300 million in the states? the assistant to hitler's dentist so that she could cover >> host: plus. >> guest: 60 million here. and and identify the jaws. so if you have the same number of people who buy books, it's an awful lot less. it removed the job from the skull. >> host: judith flanders, your >> where are those rents today? most recent book, "the invention >> well, quite interesting. of murder," what's it about? this bill is and one archived. >> guest: it's not your most this bill is in the russian safe recent book, but i'm delighted archive, the state archive of to talk about it. the russian federation. did people lie to you again? and the jaws are in the libya is. >> guest: they did. because they were taken. >> host: i've written a book called have "victorian city," ai that gives you an idea. wrote a book, my second book was called "victorian house." and i walked through a standard >> have you seen those? >> no. rowhouse in middle class i certainly have not seen the originals. one can, but the photographs, i rowhouse as they existed in the 19th century, and i looked at how people lived in the houses, think mark clear enough. what they did all day.

so many people in england still >> the last days in a bunker, hitler's bunker. live in these houses. >> well, one person who was and yet we use them so present describes them as a differently. so i thought it'd be really mixture of resignation and interesting to see actually how hysteria. the victorians used it. i think that's a very good way of putting it. so for the victorian city i hitler was dishing out cyanide decided i'd done the house, now pills as if there were suites. it was time to go outside. what happened on the street. how did the streets get used, they were -- many of them were who was there, who was passing discussing the best way to kill through, what did they look yourself. like. really wonderful stuff like and many of them did decide to shoot themselves and did exactly discovering that pavements were very -- sidewalks were a very late development. that. but the others managed to escape that previously everything had been mixed up together. i mean, those i spoke to manage so you took your life in your hands every time you walked down to get out just before the end. the street. really great stuff. they manage to get this collected note down the river and is paid the encircling street sellers, how you could, how the relatively new thing in soviet forces. >> have you had a chance england of having street food, you know, these carts that sell "besides that survivor. quite nice food, how they'd .. existed in the 19th century, and you could eat solidly wall to

wall as you walked down the streets. and it was all linked up because as everybody knows, last year was the 200th anniversary of dickens' birth. and so i used dickens, particularly his journalism, because he was an enormous streetwalker. he had -- sorry, that sounds very rude. it wasn't meant to sound rude. he wasn't really a streetwalker. he worked the streets. -- he >> guest: mainly because they'd read so many accounts, and they'd filtered their walked the streets. he had very bad insomnia, so he experiences through what they'd used to walk at night. read. so one had to be quite cautious and he described what he saw in in the way one used tear his journalism. and i realized what we had taken testimony. >> host: was there a point in in his novels for wonderful, the late '30s that, in your imaginative writing actually was view, could have prevented world stuff he'd seen. war ii? >> guest: well, i think the and that was really interesting. historian's rule should always be nothing is inevitable, but >> host: how well known was charles dixens during his -- it's very hard to see how it dickens during his time, and why could have been avoided did you use him in your subtitle considering hitler was determined to have his war. of that booksome. hitler complained to numerous >> guest: dickens was people that he was not allowed a extraordinarily well known. dickens was a rock star. war over czechoslovakia.

dickens was the mick jagger of his day, everybody knew him. he hadn't expected the british and what was interesting i found to give in at the munich through his life -- and he was agreement at 1938. so when you have somebody like very young, he was only 58 when he died. adolf hitler who is absolutely >> host: what did he die of? determined to have a war, i think it's very, very hard to avoid. and particularly where one think >> guest: hard work. that is the versailles i think he probably died of a settlement had created so many stroke, but he was worn out. through his life i found different ethnic groups split up descriptions of him, people who along the wrong side of borders had just seen him inth and so forth. i think some form of conflict was almost bound to happen in europe. but it only took the appalling anile haitian -- annihilation character that it did purely because of adolf hitler. >> host: the versailles agreement ending world war i, did that help create the circumstances for world war ii? >> guest: it certainly helped, or, if you like, it certainly created the instability at the time of rising nationalism. when you have sort of states which are suddenly becoming national itself, then they started to oppress ethnic

minorities. and, of course, if the next door state like, say, germany with the czechs started to claim that they had a right to defend, you know, their ethnic brethren across the border, then you were bound to have some sort of conflict. >> host: we are talking with british historian antony beevor about one of his books, another one is "paris after the liberation." we've kind of glossed over france here. we've talked about england, the soviet union and germany, the u.s., but what about france? >> guest: well, france, of course, was a fascinating subject. the french had been completely humiliated in 1940 by this overwhelming german defeat, and that whole question of the occupation of south france is, i think, an important one. the british, we were british whenever occupied. so it's very hard for us and we should never really make moral judgments about life under the occupation and the french relationship with the germans. i mean, we know how many now.

i mean, it's estimated that between well over 20,000 babies were born to french women by german soldier fathers during the occupation. some people say even many more. but i remember when we were preparing the book, we went so see itself zack berlin who worked in paris just a after 19 1944 with my wife's grandfather who's the ambassador there and put to him, you know, what was the rit degree of cooperation or collaboration with the germans when you had to survive? and he said quite rightly, you know, a waiter would have to go on serving germans. he said but the important thing is you didn't have to be cozy with the germans, and i've always wondered if a great moral philosopher should use the word cozy if you like the dividing line between occupation. and for the french the difficulty when the americans

arrived and the liberation arrived in 1944, no country really loves their liberator. and the origins of the difficult fraught french-american relationship really dates back to the liberation of 1934. >> host: how so? >> guest: the french felt humiliated. the french are rather thin-skinned and, actually, the americans were rather thick-skinned, you know? the g. i.s would throw out packets of cigarettes or whatever, they felt that they should automatically have their way with the women and that, of course, presented huge resentments particularly amongst french men, and there was a lot of, there was a lot of, shall we say, ill feeling on both sides. and i think that that's carried on. i mean, they were greeted with tremendous enthusiasm, of course, actually at the liberation. but things turned south very, very quickly afterwards. >> host: is there any record of how many french women had american babies as you mentioned

20,000 nazis? >> guest: no, i don't think -- i haven't actually seen a figure. be interesting to know, but i don't think it was as many. >> host: why was paris spared? why was paris never bombed? or was it? >> guest: well, paris was bombed around the outskirts. both the british and, i think, the americans bombed so forth, but nothing in the center of paris. hitler, of course, wanted to have paris destroyed as the allies advanced upon it. but fortunately, one of the generals who was made into a rather improbable hero because he'd been a complete massacre of jews on the eastern front, but he suddenly became a hero in the west because he refused hitler's orders to destroy the city. he realized that, in fact, it wasn't going to do any good, and he'd been persuaded, actually, by his predecessor that you have to prevent these insane orders being carried out. >> host: we see this landscape of london behind us here during

this interview, how much of the landscape or the city scape of london was destroyed during its bombing? >> guest: well, quite a lot. wherever there are modern buildings, basically, that was there there had been bomb damage. when i was working on the d-day book i was far more shaken that over 60,000 british were killed in the second world war by bombing and by the v rockets. but, in fact, more french finish just around 70,000 -- were killed by the allies, by the british and the americans. and there is a terrible paradox here, and that is that the armies of democracy to reduce their own casualties rely that much more on bombing and high explosives and shelling. and with the liberation of normandy as well as all of the bombing raids during the course of the occupation, that is why more french were killed by the allies, as i said, than british

killed by the germans. >> host: how much of berlin was ultimately destroyed? >> guest: it varied. i mean, the outer skirts -- the outskirts weren't hit so hard, the suburbs, but the center was virtually entirely destroyed, and mainly the big buildings partly because they were used for the defense. i mean, the photographs are of the reichstag which survived only because it was such solid, massive stone was one of the sites of one of the final battles because stalin had ordered that the symbol of capturing berlin would be to raise the red banner of victory over the reichstag itself. in one of those ironies of history, not only did the whole thing have to be restaged for the cameras, but they had to retouch the photographs because as they held up the flag, they showed all the watches that were shown on soldiers' arms, and they had to be washed out.

>> host: your most recent book is a general history of world war ii, "the second world war," it's called. is there new scholarship? is there continual interest in this war? and why? >> guest: i think so. i mean, one of the reasons why i think there's continual interest and, in fact, it's also a danger is the way that the second world war has become the dominant reference point for every crisis and conflict in the world, and that is the danger when say presidents want to sound rooseveltian or prime ministers want to sound churchillian. there is an automatic hearkening back to the second world war. let's face it, the modern world was entirely formed by it. world history came together during the second world war with not just because of its global reach, but also because it was the end, if you like, of the colonialism of all the french, british and other empires. so all of that was hugely important, but it's also because it was one of the great questions of moral courage or of

moral cowardice where you see every aspect of humanity, above all many of the worst elements of humanity in it. and i think that is still one of the reasons why it exerts the fascination that it does. >> host: and what is your personal fascination, what is your background? >> guest: well, i started, i started life as a professional army officer. but all my family, my mother's side of the family had all been writers, so at one stage i started writing, and i decided that i wanted that to be my career. so it was a curious change. but i think the advantage of having been a soldier was to have an understanding really of the emotions and the psychology to a certain degree of armies themselves. i mean, it's not quite so easy, i think, for an outsider to understand why armies react in the way they do. they're not cold, calculating machines. they're actually intensely emotional organizations. >> host: are you old enough to

remember post-war britain? >> guest: no, not -- i mean, not the immediate post-war, but i suppose earliest memories would be sort of serious and so forth. but it was, you were -- one was brought up, if you like, in this a world where almost everybody was defined on whether they'd had a good war or not. and it was, it dominated everybody's lives. i mean, friendships always reverted back or referred back to experiences in the second world war. >> host: what are you currently working on? >> guest: i have got one more book already on the second world war, and that is going to be the winter of 1944, the arden or the battle of the bulge, if you like. and then i've been working on the second world war for at least four times than it actually lasts, so for me, the war is finally over. after that i'm going to be doing something about napoleon which is due to come out in 2012, i need a good five years in the

really do it icost: antony beorwhat was battle of the bulge? was it an important battle? >> guest: i'm going to be doing it from a slightly different point of view. i'm far more interested in the german psychology at the time. it very much varied at different levels. hitler was desperate to do it. his generals realized it was going to be a disaster. but what was interesting was the younger officers and the ncos were very keen and were determined that they felt that this was their only chance to sort of to save germany from the appalling ruin which was coming from the east in the form of the red army. and it's very much the psychology, i think, on german side which fascinates me is what is the pretty heroic story on the ally, the american side. >> host: do your books do pretty well in the u.s.? >> guest: yeah, i think so. >> host: do they do better here or in the u.s.? >> guest: they do better here, and they do very well in other countries, too, in translation.

but i think inevitably one's own country that's the case. >> host: do you, do you think that -- what about the current generation? is there still an interest in world war ii? >> guest: yes. i mean, not quite to the same degree because, obviously, history for them, you know, world war ii is as far away as sort of world war i or that had been for somebody of my generation. because we're talking now a long way away. but at the same time though when one thinks of the movies still, of the television programs and all the rest of it, documentaries, i mean, you know, there are several tv channels which are almost devote today the second world war and nothing else. so from that point of view, yes. it may be on the whole, but i think there is still an extraordinary fascination. because i think what has happened and history itself has changed n. the past, history was always written in collective terms. now there is a fascination about the fate of the individual

within this mass hour horror -- or record, and i think people are trying to put themselves in the boot ofs of those who were there whether they were the civilians or soldiers caught up in this appalling sort of armageddon. >> host: where do you teach? >> guest: well, i only do a little bit of teaching from time to time, sort of a visiting professor at a couple of universities. one doesn't have the responsibilities of academic life, but one has, shall we say, the pleasures. and, you know, the contacts and exchange of ideas with friends. >> host: are you teaching currently? >> guest: not right at the moment, no. i'm working flat out, actually, on the next book. >> host: on the -- >> guest: on the 1934, the ardennes, yes. >> host: why are there different names for that? we call it the battle of the bulge. >> guest: you always call it the battle of the bulge, we do often too. i think much more of it as the ardennes offensive, but that's partly because i'm going to be writing as well from a german

point of view just as well from an ally point of view. >> host: antony beevor has been our guest on booktv here in london. thank you for joining us. >> guest: thank you very much, indeed. >> next from london, booktv interviews judith flanders about high in london in the victorian era and the city's present-day underground. ms. flanders is the author of five nonfiction books. this interview is about 35 minutes. >> host: and this is booktv on c-span2. we are in london interviewing authors, and we want to introduce you to author judith flanders who now joins us. judith flanneledders writes about the victorian era in many of her books. ms. flanders, what is the victorian era when we talk about that? >> guest: well, the victorian era is technically the period in which queen victoria reigned. so it is technically 1837-1901.

i'm not very technical, i cheat a lot, so my books cover what we politely call the long 19th century. which sometimes starts in the 18th century, so sometimes i discuss things that happened in the runup to queen victoria and often it goes to the beginning of world war i in 1914 which is, actually, a much more logical break when things changed very radically again. >> host: was it known as the victorian era at that time? >> guest: um, a little bit. not the way we know it, no. because apart from anything else, of course, it's much easier to call something an era once you know when it's going to end, and they didn't, and they didn't know it was going to be one of the longest reigns in british history and cover, really, the greater part of a century. i mean, you couldn't imagine that would happen. >> host: why was it one of the greatest periods in british history? >> guest: no, just the longest. >> host: longest.

>> guest: no, no, i'm not passing personal judgment here. i like the victorians, but not even does. >> host: if you had to describe that era in british history, though, how would you describe it? >> guest: i think of it as a time of possibility. what i mean -- yes, there was dreadful stuff if you read dickens, if you read lots of 19th century novelists, there's this terrible factory system, there's tremendous poverty. there are undoubtedly dreadful things that went on in the 19th century. but it was an era of hope and the idea that the future was going to be better. and we've got very cynical. and it often -- and fearful. we think the future's bound to be worse. i like the that things could -- the idea that things could get better, and if we work for a better society, we can produce a better society. and even saying those words today sounds so goody-goody. but in the 19th century they really believed it, and that's rather moving, i find.

>> host: was there a big class division during that time? >> guest: enormous. in many ways for victorian historian now, it's not a happy time the live because i see a lot of the worst of the 19th century happening again, the very large division between the very richest and the very poorest happening again. the whole thing of even people in work, often good work, unable to live decently, in decent housing, feed and clothe their children adequately. you see that then, you see it -- you saw it now as well as then. and so a lot of what we're seeing. as a historian, you want to cover your eyes and say, don't do that, don't to do that. we did it, it was terrible. don't do it again. >> host: your book, "a circle of sisters," who is that apt? >> guest: the book, when i explain it to americans, it's

very funny because i say that these were four women who were married to or the children of or had -- sorry, married to or the parents of very famous people who you in america have never heard of. so it's less exciting perhaps. but basically, one was married to the painter edward bern jones, one was the mother of roderick kipling -- rudyard kipling who in america you have heard of. one was the mother of stanley baldwin who was a british prime minister, so kipling and baldwin were first cousins. and one was married to a then very famous painter, now very little known and if you've seen the pictures, there's a reason he's really not very well known. but he helped set up the tate gallery, so he was in administrative art terms very important. >> host: and these were sisters. >> guest: they were four sisters, they were the children

of a not very prosperous methodist minister in the north, and they just happened somehow. >> host: and how did they come from the north daughters of a vick-- vicar and become well known women or prosperous -- >> guest: happenstance really. the mother of kipling married a not very successful artist who became an arts administrator in india, so that's chance. the wife of bern jones married a then-not at all successful painter who happened to have gone to school with her brother. so that was happenstance. the only one who actually married well was the one who married baldwin. they were a very prosperous family. they were what was known as iron founders which means that they had the equivalent of steel mills today.

and they were very wealthy. but, and she knew him through the methodist church. but otherwise, it just happened. >> host: where did you find their story, and why did you find them compelling? >> guest: i found the story, i was reading a biography of kipling, and i saw something that said, you know, his first cousin, stanley baldwin. i thought how on earth was kipling's first cousin stanley baldwin in and then it said something about staying with aunt and uncle, the bern jones' and i thought how did that happen? so i did a little research, and i found there was this extraordinary group, and i did what we all did which is i thought, hmm, one day i should do something about that. and then i went on with my life for 15 years. i was a publisher, and i was perfectly happy being a publisher. i had no plans to write a book, and then things changed, and i thought one day, hmm, i am going

to do something about that. >> host: were they -- did they live during the victorian erasome. >> guest: they did, almost precisely. i wrote the book 15 years ago, so if you're going to check on the dates now, that's going to be interesting. one of them was born in 1820, i do remember that. she was one of the younger ones. so, yes. i mean, they all lived from the early part of the 19th century. i think one ultimately died in about 1910, '20. she was the last. so one of the things that attracted me was, apart from the fact that you had a politician,