Peter Snow and Dan Snow My Life in Books

APPLAUSE

Welcome to My Life In Books,

a chance for my guests to share their favourite reads.

Joining me tonight, two members of one of television's dynasties, the Snows.

Peter, the man who gave appreciative viewers

more and more exciting swingometers at election time.

He's also been an intrepid reporter,

a presenter of Newsnight and Tomorrow's World,

and more recently he's teamed up with his son Dan to tell stories

of famous battles on land and at sea in several television series.

The Snows can trace their ancestry back to a former British

Prime Minister, Lloyd George, and a First World War general.

We're bristling with history tonight.

-Thank you both for joining me.

-APPLAUSE

Let's begin with your childhood reads.

-Peter, you were born in Dublin.

-Yes.

-And then London, you grew up.

Spent a lot of time in Dublin as a young boy during the war.

My mother was Irish, my dad was English,

he was a soldier in the army, and I spent most of my time in Dublin.

You were born in 1938, so was your father away?

He went away soon after that, and went off with the British

Expeditionary Force, to Burma and India,

all over the place, and he came back, and I didn't see much of him for my first six or seven years.

Then I went to boarding school, so I didn't see much of him.

-So who was reading to you in the early years?

-My mum.

My Irish mum with her gentle Irish accent would read that wonderful

book you're holding, Babar, and it's marvellous stuff.

OK, this is your first choice. It's Babar the King, Jean de Brunhoff.

Tell us about this.

Everybody's heard of Babar The Elephant. I mean, it's just heaven.

His poor old mother gets shot by some nasty hunters, he then

wanders off, finds a city, a nice old lady gives him money,

buys himself some clothes, dresses up, dolls up - bowler hat, the lot - and then he finds his...

Two of his cousins come along and join him and so he gets them dressed as well, goes back to Elephant Land

and becomes king. And he builds this beautiful capital, names it after his wife, Celeste -

Celesteville - and it's just absolutely heaven.

All the elephants swimming in the foreground, they have a little hut with a straw roof,

and there's a Palace of Pleasure and a Palace of Work, and everything is involved.

And there's sailing, they love sailing, which I love doing as well.

-Maybe I learnt to love it from that.

-It's a socialist utopia,

and Dad's obsessed with models. He has a model railway.

I remember Dad being obsessed by this picture and I found it strange.

Did he have a full train set in the house?

We had one in our house that Dan was more or less born in, in Islington,

it used to go round the top floor, through the bathroom as well.

LAUGHTER

But we have one in the present house, bigger loft, and it has

three separate lines, three trains at the same time.

-And did you play with the train set?

-Not really, no.

Dad did, and I'd have to sit beside him while he played with it.

Were you read this book, obviously, as well?

Oh, yes, I have to say, nearly all the books on this table I read.

I was introduced to by an incredibly...

Mum, Dad, aunties and Grandma in particular were huge readers,

-but this was a staple of childhood.

-He likes being read to.

Liked being read to, not now!

He read to me, embarrassingly... he read to me until I was about six foot tall, so I was about

13 or 14, and people would come in and we'd be curled up on the sofa with him reading aloud.

Also reading weird books like Thucydides, you know,

The History Of The Peloponnesian War. People were struck by that.

-But you enjoyed it?

-I loved it.

-I loved it, yeah.

-Tell us a bit more about your childhood.

You were one of six children in all.

One of six children in all.

At the time we thought there were five, and then one turned up that was a bit older than me. But...

Five when we were growing up. We never saw Dad during the week.

Monday to Friday, because he's a perfectionist, he worked all the hours that God sent.

He was...

I used to go in in the morning, throw the papers on his bed, and then...

and then say "good morning", then he'd work on Newsnight till midnight.

On the weekend, he didn't play golf, didn't go out with his mates,

he was absolutely obsessed with the children.

So we'd go to museums. I've been to every National Trust, English Heritage...

any in the South East and, frankly, all of the UK.

And we're reading constantly, playing games, doing stuff.

-And a great deal of sailing.

-A huge amount.

And by the Sunday night, we were ready to say goodbye to him for another week!

Well, it's not surprising your first choice, a childhood read,

-is Treasure Island. Tell us about it.

-I had this beautiful...

Still one of my favourite books, this hardback copy of

Treasure Island, I remember all the illustrations so well, they are works of art in their own right.

One of my favourites, growing up. The ultimate adventure story.

It's never been bettered, it just does it all.

It's a story about a young boy, put into this tumultuous journey

to go and find this treasure on a desert island.

They discover castaways, a mutiny, a fantastic battle.

I remember words like musket and stockade, wonderful 18th-century words

that really resonated, and they still do with me today.

And in the end they find the treasure and all go back,

and the goodies win, and it's one of the great novels, I think, of British history.

-How old were you when you discovered it?

-From before I even remember.

-OK.

-Dad would tell me these stories and I'd discover he hadn't made them up

-and someone called Robert Louis Stevenson had.

-Have you a favourite passage?

Well, there's a wonderful passage here.

"As I was waiting, a man came out of a side room,

"and at a glance I was sure it must be Long John.

"His left leg was cut off close to the hip, under the left shoulder he carried a crutch,

"which he managed with wonderful dexterity, hopping about on it like a bird.

"He was very tall and strong with a face as big as a ham, plain and pale, but intelligent and smiling.

"Indeed, he seemed in the most cheerful spirits, whistling as he moved among the tables with

"a merry word or slap on the shoulder for the more favoured of his guests."

-Lovely.

-I mean, to imagine yourself as a child

in those situations as a young boy just set me on fire.

And you were very fond of pirates as a youngster, we've got a picture.

Very cute you look there. A sort of Little Lord Fauntleroy.

I know. Where did it all go wrong?

Are you all great sailors and all very adventurous?

We're all very adventurous, I think.

We all have a very high tolerance for pain and discomfort!

They are all very good sailors, they love it.

Was Treasure Island because you were sailing, or did that help to get you interested?

I think, Treasure Island, show me a young person that

doesn't like Treasure Island. It's impossible.

We're on to Peter for your next read.

It's quite a different book, this.

It's The Collected Poems of James Elroy Flecker. Why this choice?

That's me in my romantic mood. Flecker is just heaven.

Flecker is one of those young,

just pre-First World War people, fascinated by...

..fascinated by travel, fascinated by the Middle East, fascinated by the Arabs.

Fascinated by the sort of, the sultans of Baghdad, the sultans of Turkey

and the caliphs, the caliphs of Baghdad.

And his poetry is simply beautiful, just absolutely lovely.

How old were you when you discovered this?

I was actually at school. I was about 15 when I discovered Flecker.

Somebody said, "Have you read Flecker's play Hassan?"

And I hadn't read Hassan, and I read it and was absolutely captivated.

Just let me read you a little passage. I mean, here's his poem To A Poet A Thousand Years Hence.

"I who am dead a thousand years and wrote this sweet archaic song

"Send you my words for messengers, the way I shall not pass along

"Since I can never see your face and never shake you by the hand

"I send my soul through time and space, to greet you

"You will understand."

Terribly simple. Utterly beautiful.

Was it the sort of poetry that people around you were reading at that time, 14 or 15-year-olds?

Well, there were a lot of mixed-up characters like me

at school, but I think probably some didn't think this was very...

A lot of TS Eliot around, you know, which I had no time for, I'm afraid.

I like stuff that rhymes, and I like stuff I can understand.

-I'm a very simple fellow.

-Is that your school copy?

This is my original copy. You seem to have something rather snazzy.

But this is my dear old copy that's falling apart.

-But you love this too, don't you?

-Dad made me learn...

He decided that I had no education when I was about 12.

You're not at boarding school, unlike your father?

No, I was able to walk to every school I ever went to.

Was that a decision you made...?

I would never have sent him to boarding school after my experiences.

You went away at seven, which now seems very draconian, doesn't it, to send a child away?

I went off at seven, clutching my teddy bear, terrified of what would happen at school.

I took Patrick to school with me, my teddy bear, and I thought, I mean,

"Patrick will save me from being too shy and lonely."

But he didn't. I mean, I... Everybody else laughed at me.

I wrapped Patrick up three days later and sent him home in a parcel.

I was really miserable, but then of course, after a week or two, there I was, you know,

as brave as...

Tough as goodness knows what.

It makes you rather too early into a man, going to boarding school.

-Didn't like it at all.

-You didn't have to be a man so early?

-No, I was very soft.

I used to come home and see my mum every night. But I...

You did have to learn poetry?

I did, Dad decided I didn't have any education

when I was about 12 because we were learning about

baobab trees in geography and wattle and daub houses in history.

He said "You're not forced to learn strange Victorian poetry like I was?!"

So my cousin Alex and I... He's Canadian, had even less education cos they used to do things

like maths and science over there, which Dad didn't approve of at all.

He and I were made to learn Tennyson's Ulysses

which, to be honest, annoyingly remains to this day one of my favourite poems, amazing poem,

and we learnt every single word, and Dad used to test us every day.

We realised, like all great prisoners, we could rebel

in some way against this, cos we realised Dad couldn't make us

declaim it in a very thespy way like he wanted us to, so if we went...

-MONOTONOUSLY:

-"Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole..."

so we could actually learn it but we could also enrage him.

-But it's wonderful stuff.

-Can you still remember...?

"Though we are not now that strength which in old times moved earth and heaven

"That which we are, we are One equal temper of heroic hearts

"Made weak by time and faith, but strong in will

"To seek, to strive, to search and not to find."

-No, that's not right.

-LAUGHTER

No, I've got it! "To seek, to strive, to fight and not to yield."

-Right.

-"To strive, to seek", yeah, correct.

-Very mean.

-Lots of verbs.

I got one line wrong, these things happen. But it is the most marvellous poetry.

Dan, your next choice, Dreadnought,

Robert K Massie. How old are you

when you choose this?

I was about 11 and I just read this

because Robert Massie is a phenomenal writer of history,

and what's amazing about this book is that, although there's a...

the spine is about this steel and the ship being built, it's about the architects,

about the politicians, about the public that demanded these ships as they were scared of Germany.

It's about the Germans that then built other ships because they were also scared.

The key thing for a historian, whether it's on television or here, is to bring out

the human reasons why all this violence is going on.

And in fact, so sold on it that you did a series which covered the Dreadnought, didn't you?

Yes, I did, I was lucky enough... I mean, it was a dream come true.

I was lucky enough to make a series on the history of the Royal Navy for BBC Two last year.

We've got a clip.

'Construction began on the 2nd October 1905.

'Under top-secret conditions, 3,000 men worked 11 hours a day,

'six days a week in the Portsmouth Royal Dockyard.

'With record-breaking speed,

'the first Dreadnought was completed just a year and a day later.'

Why is it that men are so excited

by warfare and guns and stuff that kills people?

It's a very good question, and they shouldn't be.

What is extraordinary about this book, it talks about human beings.

The thing about warfare that's extraordinary,

it's about putting humans in the most extreme positions they will ever be in.

They are fighting for their lives, often hand-to-hand

against somebody else, often for a cause they don't fully understand.

Whatever we're saying about warfare, about the excitement,

the drive, the awfulness of it, it is rather important.

Trying to understand why people fight each other is important

because it's the big wars that change the shape of the map.

-But nevertheless, Peter, the kit...

-The kit. I agree...

You see, Dad and I aren't obsessed by kit, we came to military history absolutely through

the great human stories, but you're right, a lot of men

-come though it because of the turning circle of a Spitfire.

-What makes you choose a book?

Where do you, if you're standing in a book shop...?

The decisive test of a book, do I go on turning the pages? I always say...

I've written one or two books, but when I give someone one of my books

or I see them buying it, I say, "If you reach page 30

"and you don't want to turn the page, chuck it away."

Do you chuck away, or do you doggedly go on?

I'm a big of a dogged... I think I, yeah, I'm just a bit dogged.

It must be something to do with my childhood of just being beaten up so much intellectually

and taken round country houses and museums. I just assume

that you have to go, finish it to the end.

The idea of leaving a Snow family walk halfway,

going back to the car was not an option.

Your next choice, Peter, is Mark Urban, Rifles.

Tell me about this.

Mark Urban worked with me on Newsnight

and I thought I'd pick up his book and read it,

wonderful story about the Rifles,

an incredible regiment that went with Wellington, fought through the Peninsular and fought at Waterloo.

And they had these very long, accurate weapons.

The rifle, unlike the musket, very effective.

I thought, "Interesting, it's fascinating." An amazing amount of direct speech.

This must be like Bernard Cornwall's Sharpe, it must be a fiction book, it must be an invention. It's not!

-It's a deep piece of research.

-Yes, but it's true,

these people really said what they say in his book.

And they wrote diaries and journals and letters home and so on, telling these stories.

And that fascinated me and actually motivated me to write about Wellington,

the whole story of the Duke of Wellington, from Portugal to Waterloo.

Do you think it's important to revisit history and reassess?

Crucial, terribly important.

People who don't understand history don't understand what we're doing now, where we're going.

History is absolutely essential. It's one of the saddest things

that we have at the moment no compulsory history until the age of 16.

It should be compulsory.

Dan, you studied history at Oxford, do you think it's important to revisit history?

Of course. It's both important

and infinitely rewarding, it's fantastic.

And without a sense of history, we've got no sense of who we are,

either as individuals, as a family - certainly in our case - and as a society.

OK. Your next choice, we move from history, this is 20th century.

It's Ryszard Kapuscinski,

called The Shadow Of The Sun,

it's nonfiction, My African Life.

Yeah, I mean, Ryszard Kapuscinski,

I think, is one of the greatest authors I've ever come across.

He wrote so beautifully about the Soviet Union,

he's written about lots of things. He was a Polish journalist

and he was travelling round Africa during the period of de-colonisation,

and that's a fascinating point of view,

because the Western journalists were very much involved in it,

Brits were watching Britain pull out of Africa.

He had a curiously detached standpoint, really.

And being Polish, he was allowed in, he got access to certain Communist movements,

things in Africa, it gives him a unique voice.

I think the funny thing about Kapuscinski is

he often doesn't talk about the key moment when one politician

was exchanged for another one, he actually just sits back and chats with people in the marketplace.

And it's not a brilliant work of history, or even journalism,

just simply a man's travels through this incredibly colourful, deeply tragic and never-boring continent.

-Can you read us a favourite passage?

-Yes. I mean, there's the thing that anyone who visits the tropics,

it's so different to Britain, where the sun goes down so slowly, so this is about night falling.

"We drove on, night had already fallen.

"Everything that in Europe is called dusk and evening here last only a few minutes, if it exists at all.

"It is daytime and then night, as if someone has turned off

"the sun's generator with one flip of the switch.

"All at once, all is black.

"In one instant, we're inside the night's darkest core.

"If this change surprises you as you are walking through the bush, you must stop immediately.

"You can see nothing, as if somebody unexpectedly pulled a sack over your head.

"You become disorientated, don't know where you are.

"In such darkness, people converse without seeing one another.

"They might call out to one another not realising they're side by side.

"The darkness separates people and thereby intensifies all the more

"their desire to be together in a group, in a community."

I mean, he really steeps himself in the life in Africa.

It must have been the sort of budget that no journalist would be allowed now to spend that much time.

I know. The funny thing is he didn't even cover some of the big events,

too busy snoozing under a broken-down truck in Sudan, chatting with the driver for a week.

-Yeah. It is like a travel book.

-Yeah, it's a travel book.

-Have you read it, Peter?

-Yes, I have.

Wonderfully insightful book. Fascinating.

Peter, with your next choice, this is called One For The Money.

There's a very racy girl

with very few clothes on,

-pointing a gun at somebody.

-Stephanie Plum.

-Yes.

The author is described as a bestselling author, Janet Evanovich.

Recommended by your wife.

Absolutely. My wife is North American, Canadian.

This is actually by someone from New Jersey.

Janet Evanovich is very funny, she keeps me laughing throughout the book.

And she writes about this wonderful Stephanie Plum, half-naked on the front page.

But she sells lingerie.

And she's so desperate, she loses her job, that she decides to become

a bounty hunter, collecting people who haven't paid their bail. And so she buys a gun

and she charges around Trenton, New Jersey,

trying to find people who jump bail. It's terribly funny.

Goes from mishap to mishap, making a terrible nonsense of everything

and meeting the most appalling crooks and criminals. I'm going to read you a little passage.

She also has terrible trouble with her family, who are all rather mad.

Her grandmother is like a piece of old granite, she's about 90 years old, and...

she goes home with her gun for the first time

and has dinner with her mum and dad and her granny

and she says, "No-one had been paying attention to Grandma.

"She was still playing with my gun.

"Aiming and sighting, getting used to the heft of it.

"I realised there was a box of ammo beside the tampons.

"A scary thought skittered into my mind, 'Grandma, you didn't load the gun, did you?'

"'Well, of course I loaded the gun,' she said.

"'I left the one hole empty like I saw on television, that way you can't shoot nothing by mistake.'

"She cocked the gun to demonstrate the safety of her action, there was a loud bang, a flash

"erupted from the gun barrel and the chicken carcass jumped on its plate.

"'Holy Mother of God!' my mother shrieked.

"Grandma was the first to speak after that.

"'That shooting gave me an appetite,' she said. 'Somebody pass me the potatoes.'"

It's just wonderful stuff.

-Did your mother give it to you as well, Dan?

-What can I say? I'd like to pretend Dad's a mad eccentric

but they're fantastic and I've read several of them.

There's now 17 of them.

17. Smokin' Seventeen.

-Sizzling Sixteen. And they're all about the same woman.

-You've read all of them?

-No, quite a lot of them.

-I've read about two or three. Very good.

Does Stephanie Plum remind you of anyone?

She reminds me of, sort of, my...

Well, no, I'm very careful about what I say about my wife but,

I mean, she's sort of snazzy, you know, she goes for things.

And that's nice. And she'll try anything, my wife will too.

She's a wonderful, a wonderful person.

-Does that remind you of your mother?

-Not in the least does it remind me of my mother.

Completely mad. But it washes over me now, I'm used to it.

-Dan, you were 18 when you discovered you had an extra brother?

-Yes.

Yes. How did that come about?

-Why did you suddenly look at me like that?

-Well, I thought you might have something to do with it.

I got this call during the 1997 election campaign,

from a bloke who said, "Hello, my name is Matthieu Debost."

-I said, "Hello, Matthieu."

-No, what did you actually say?

No, he said, "I think you might be my father." I'm coming to that.

So I said, "Well, are you tall, dark and handsome?"

He said, "Some people say I'm quite good looking."

So I said, "You'd better come across and have lunch and we'll see."

So he came across to England.

He did say that he was a certain person's son,

who turned out to be someone I did indeed know for a short while, in...

Actually in Egypt, in Cairo, it was rather more peaceful, and we went on a Nile cruise.

But anyway, he came over to London, we had a test, and indeed he was

my son and I introduced him to the family and they all loved it.

-It's wonderful. The nicest man in the world.

-When you first saw him, was there any doubt, facially?

Well, some people said - Dan included -

"Don't know why on Earth you want to have a test because he looks exactly like you!"

-Which I suppose is partly true.

-He's got the Snow nose and the teeth that go back. He's got the works.

-The big chin...

-But he's French.

He has all the advantages of Dad's genes without any

of the disadvantages of having grown up in our family.

LAUGHTER

So, you know, he has a lovely home life.

He works in a bank, he's rich, he's got a proper job,

nice pension, nice car, whereas we're completely hopeless.

Your next choice, Dan.

-Yes.

-The Iliad.

The Iliad. I suppose I...

It's one of these books

I keep knocking into at various

phases of my life, and as a military historian I'm so drawn to it,

it's one of the oldest works in Western literature and, really, it says everything you need to know

about warfare, about its victims, about the women and children that suffer such terrible losses.

-Can you give us a quick guide to it?

-Very straightforward.

The Iliad comes at the end of a ten-year terrible siege, total war, this Trojan...

the Trojan city by the Greeks, and the high command, the army's starting to fall out,

they haven't captured the city, the high command are falling out.

The leader Agamemnon steals the slave girl of Achilles, his finest warrior.

And Achilles goes into a huge slump, he refuses to fight for the Greeks

and, as a result, the Trojans almost succeed in pushing them back.

Then Achilles's best friend Patroclus is killed

and that brings Achilles back into the fighting.

He then leads the Greeks, this big resurgence, and in the end...

the end of The Iliad is Achilles killing this great tragic hero,

Hector, the Trojan warrior.

And actually, of course, you don't hear about the fall of Troy in The Iliad,

that comes in The Odyssey.

And it helped you through a particular incident?

Yeah. I was sailing across the Atlantic. When Dad and I sailed across the Atlantic,

the deal was that I would sail back and Dad said, "I don't want the boat getting left in the Caribbean!"

-It had taken you how long?

-It took about two or three weeks to get there.

Dad said, "I've got to get back to work now, so bring it back." So I said, "Sure."

I rang all my friends, none of whom were available at short notice to sail back,

so I had to press-gang a few people at the last minute.

Just put together a crew, many of whom had never sailed.

We're in this huge storm on the way in the middle of the Atlantic, the worst storm I'd ever been in.

And everyone else was down below, and the hatches were all closed,

and our autopilot broke so someone had to be up on deck steering the ship through this big, big storm.

It lasted for hours, the whole day, and I had a Walkman

in those days with a story tape, it was Derek Jacobi reading The Iliad.

I mean, phenomenal actor, beautiful voice, reading one of the world's greatest pieces of literature.

And I will never forget it. I remember steering through the storm,

and it totally took my mind off the, you know,

-great fear that I was feeling, it just swept me up, it took me to a completely different place.

-OK.

We've had your childhood reads, the books that have influenced you later on, we want to move on to the books

that you simply enjoyed, or your guilty pleasure, or your beach read.

Peter, you come first with Tom Clancy, Red Storm Rising.

Tell me about that.

I mean, crossing the Atlantic

with Dan and co, I had to have a good novel,

and Clancy is just extraordinary, Dan loves him too.

There's wonderful Jack Ryan.

I'm absolutely glued to the television when 24's on, and Jack Bauer.

It's fantastic stuff. You can't...

You can't turn it off. Tom Clancy is the same, and Jack Ryan.

But this book is about the great war, of course, that never happened,

the Cold War breaking out into hot war in Europe in the 1980s, this is about 20 years old, this book.

There's a coup inside the Kremlin, they turf out the militants, and they do a deal with the West.

Calm down, Dad. He gets very excited.

Very exciting, very exciting. You're occasionally quite excited.

It's boy's stuff.

It's boy's stuff, and it is escape.

This is real, frankly, real rubbish, if I may say so.

-This is just fun to read, it's a page-turner.

-This is military rubbish.

800 pages, and you just turn them one after the other.

OK. So, 800 pages of military rubbish for Peter,

your guilty pleasure is quite different, Dan.

It's Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Yeah. It's my favourite novel.

I'm not even that guilty about it.

I don't like fantasy, and I don't like magic books, but I like magic realism.

I like Marquez, I like Rushdie, I just find...

The reason is because my grandmother, who we call Nain because she's Welsh, she comes from

this incredible tradition of Welsh storytelling -

we used to sit round her feet and she'd tell us stories,

and all her stories would be about families and generations,

and the sins of fathers being visited upon their children,

she'd tell us about her families, and they all had a hint of magic.

It was a universe we recognised, but it was just surrounded with a tiny little hint of magic.

-And this is a family history?

-Yes, over a few generations,

living in a world that we recognise but occasionally there's an intervention.

It's exactly how I remember my nain telling me stories when we were growing up.

-When were you reading it?

-I read this on my gap year when I was travelling round hot climes,

desperate to fall in love with people and have romantic experiences and feel the magic.

I suppose I vaguely imagined myself as one of the characters in this book when I was 18.

Now, if you had to choose just one book to recommend, which of yours would you choose, Peter?

I think the one that makes you laugh. I mean, the one that makes you laugh.

-Evanovich.

-Mrs Snow's book?

Mrs Snow's book, and thank goodness for Mrs Snow. She's right.

Indeed. What about you, Dan?

I'm afraid I would choose Dreadnought.

It shows that history can be as readable as anything else on this table

and, frankly, is almost more important than anything else on this table.

Much more serous and sensible answer than mine, by the way. Quite right.

What do you think your choices say about you, Peter?

Oh, that although my feet are fairly firmly anchored on the ground,

I'm an incurable romantic and an escapist. I think the same for him.

I think that Dad's books tell you that he's a man of extremely eclectic and eccentric interests,

none of which have anything to do with each other. So, I mean, it's...

When he told me about his five books I was like, "They make no sense!"

Completely mad.

And your five books, what do they say about you?

I think they probably say I've got incredibly mainstream tastes.

-All fairly obvious.

-There we are.

Thank you, Peter and Dan Snow for joining me on My Life In Books.

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