. >> roger garside who i am happy to say still alive. an absolutely magnificent book that has stood the test of time. some journalists wrote that looks at the time but i would say his is the one that's hard to be precisely because as you say he went out and he was on the ground and he got the story. he saw things very pragmatically without an ideological lens. he caught a lot of things that other of service miss. >> host: that's interesting so ideology is or can be the enemy of history. >> guest: very much so. i am struck when i look back at this period again by how the very ideological people didn't understand what they were seeing. i had a good conversation with conan on makia whom you might remember as the man who wrote a fantastic book about the evils of the saddam hussein regime in iraq and he was a very convinced leftist. he is a trotskyite. he describes that his wife is iranian and they were both trotskyists. he described to me how completely bewildering the iranian revolution was to them. if you believed in theories of class stru