:00:10. > :00:17.Humans are storytelling animals. We need stories to survive and to make
:00:18. > :00:21.sense of the nonsense and joy and madness and sadness that is everyday
:00:22. > :00:26.life. And what I love about books is that
:00:27. > :00:29.they provide as good a way of enjoying and sharing stories as can
:00:30. > :00:32.be experienced. The half-dozen titles shortlisted
:00:33. > :00:34.for this year's Samuel Johnson Prize, Britain's most prestigious
:00:35. > :00:45.award for non-fiction, exemplify storytelling at its best.
:00:46. > :00:48.These are books that go from bees to Roman Britain, from the First Afghan
:00:49. > :00:53.War, to a biography of Thatcher, from a womanising radical poet to
:00:54. > :00:56.how we commemorate the dead. Whatever your interests are, there's
:00:57. > :01:01.something in this list, I would argue, for anyone. This is a truly
:01:02. > :01:05.eclectic list of some of the very best books being published in
:01:06. > :01:08.Britain today. Here to whet your appetite about
:01:09. > :01:10.these six fascinating reads are some highly-qualified reviewers, all of
:01:11. > :01:19.whom have judged the Samuel Johnson Prize in previous years.
:01:20. > :01:25.It's such a diverse list, it's hard to tell which book is going to win,
:01:26. > :01:30.but I certainly have my favourites. Whatever my preferences, one thing's
:01:31. > :01:33.for sure: All six books will take you on rewarding and unexpected
:01:34. > :01:47.journeys, and broaden your sense of the world.
:01:48. > :01:52.It's hard to go anywhere these days without hearing how publishing is
:01:53. > :01:57.dead, how the internet is killing book culture and how threatened
:01:58. > :02:00.non-fiction is. As a publisher, you won't be surprised to learn that I
:02:01. > :02:03.think that these concerns are overblown. For whilst the digital
:02:04. > :02:05.transformation of our lives undeniably presents considerable
:02:06. > :02:17.challenges, it also offers unprecedented opportunities.
:02:18. > :02:20.It means the competition for people's time, it means publishers
:02:21. > :02:24.and writers need to be more experimental, more creative, they
:02:25. > :02:27.need to think of more new ways to tell stories. We are swamped with
:02:28. > :02:32.information and what a writer, or the best writers of non-fiction do,
:02:33. > :02:36.is do that sifting for you. Readers have less patience now to wade
:02:37. > :02:40.through a huge book - it doesn't mean they won't do it occasionally -
:02:41. > :02:45.and some books merit that length. But I think there is a tendency for
:02:46. > :02:50.writers to try and be a little more concise in what they do. I don't
:02:51. > :02:54.think we've ever been in a more exciting time to be a publisher, or
:02:55. > :03:00.a reader or, for that matter, a writer.
:03:01. > :03:03.One short but very powerful book on this year's list is Empires of the
:03:04. > :03:06.Dead by David Crane, about the creation of the war cemeteries -
:03:07. > :03:17.here reviewed by historian and former Prize Judge, Stella Tillyard.
:03:18. > :03:19.Empires of the Dead tells the fascinating but forgotten story
:03:20. > :03:28.behind British military cemeteries like this one in Brookwood, Surrey.
:03:29. > :03:32.Cemeteries that today we see all over the world wherever British and
:03:33. > :03:36.Commonwealth soldiers have fought. This book reveals how these fields
:03:37. > :03:43.of graves were the vision of one man in the First World War.
:03:44. > :03:46.His name was Fabian Ware. And he was faced when manning the early
:03:47. > :03:49.ambulance service in the early battlefields of France with what to
:03:50. > :03:54.do about the enormous numbers of bodies that very quickly began to
:03:55. > :03:58.accumulate. He had a vision - an empire of the dead - a place where
:03:59. > :04:05.the dead could rest in equality and forever in the places where they had
:04:06. > :04:08.fallen. It's a seemingly small subject but which grows into a very
:04:09. > :04:14.large history of an idea, really, and that's one of the things that
:04:15. > :04:17.makes the book so compelling. Today, these cemeteries have become
:04:18. > :04:22.part of our national consciousness, even identity. So I was fascinated
:04:23. > :04:25.to learn how contentious they were at the time, with the greatest
:04:26. > :04:31.opposition coming from relatives of the dead.
:04:32. > :04:34.One can have every sympathy with the families because of course what
:04:35. > :04:44.you'd want is to bring the person you loved back, and to have a place
:04:45. > :04:47.where you could visit them. So Ware faced immense opposition from
:04:48. > :04:51.families and was pilloried as heartless, as cruel.
:04:52. > :04:57.I found the detail in Crane's book riveting - and harrowing. It's
:04:58. > :05:00.staggering to think more than 4,000 headstones had to be shipped over to
:05:01. > :05:03.the continent a week, while search parties were dispatched to the
:05:04. > :05:11.battlefields to find bodies, a grim task which Crane describes with
:05:12. > :05:15.powerful intensity. SHE READS: 'Wooden crosses lurching
:05:16. > :05:19.drunkenly on the edge of flooded craters, the pathetic scraps of a
:05:20. > :05:22.body lying beneath a blanket, a fleshless arm jutting out of a
:05:23. > :05:25.buried dug-out, long lines of searches steadily moving across a
:05:26. > :05:27.morass of mud with that intent air of a police cordon searching for a
:05:28. > :05:31.missing child.' In total, more than half a million
:05:32. > :05:48.dead were buried in Ware's cemeteries, soldiers from all over
:05:49. > :05:50.the Empire. What remains when Crane describes
:05:51. > :05:54.these cemeteries is the uniformity and equality amongst the dead, of
:05:55. > :05:57.all faiths, all countries and all classes and I think that's one thing
:05:58. > :06:15.that's rather beautiful about the vision and one reason these
:06:16. > :06:18.cemeteries are so striking today. Equally pithy and moving is A String
:06:19. > :06:23.in the Tale, the scientist Dave Goulson's book on bees. This time
:06:24. > :06:30.our reviewer is journalist and former Prize Judge, Sam Leith.
:06:31. > :06:36.This is a part memoir, part natural history account into the inner world
:06:37. > :06:39.of the bumblebee. What's special about this book
:06:40. > :06:42.really is it absolutely seeds with enthusiasm, and that's something
:06:43. > :06:47.that always sings on the page in nonfiction. His voice comes through
:06:48. > :06:50.it constantly, it's self-deprecating, it's kind of wry
:06:51. > :06:53.and he accepts some of the absurdities of what he's doing and
:06:54. > :06:58.the silliness and he's kind of in love with it. Not only does it tell
:06:59. > :07:02.you an awful lot about bees you'd have had no idea about but the
:07:03. > :07:07.closer in you look, the more there is to be fascinated by. Wow, so they
:07:08. > :07:12.do that?! I've come to meet Dave - and some
:07:13. > :07:18.bees - for which we need to don some rather fetching protection suits.
:07:19. > :07:33.Rather surprisingly, we're not in the countryside but on the roof of a
:07:34. > :07:44.London hotel. Bees here do better than in the countryside. Out in the
:07:45. > :07:48.countryside there actually aren't that many flowers, and this is true
:07:49. > :07:50.for if you're a honeybee or a bumblebee.
:07:51. > :07:53.So, Dave, can you introduce us to your guests?
:07:54. > :07:58.So, these are the bees, the species of bee that people keep in hives and
:07:59. > :08:01.that we get honey from. I'm actually a specialist in bumblebees, which
:08:02. > :08:04.are the wild relatives of bumblebees, if you like, which is a
:08:05. > :08:07.bit like the difference between a domestic cat and a tiger.
:08:08. > :08:10.The book charts Dave's attempts to understand and conserve the
:08:11. > :08:14.endangered wild species. One of the things I absolutely loved
:08:15. > :08:17.about your book is it tells you a lot about how scientists do science
:08:18. > :08:20.and it's bonkers, you've got you tying bits of tinsel to bees and
:08:21. > :08:23.chasing them across gardens or snipping off their feet and
:08:24. > :08:26.travelling around with pickled bee feet.
:08:27. > :08:30.It's just about curiosity. About trying to understand the natural
:08:31. > :08:37.world, the ecology of bees. It's really amazing stuff. You talked
:08:38. > :08:44.about experiment about how you found out how much energy they actually
:08:45. > :08:47.burn? To stay in the air, a bumblebee has to flap its wings
:08:48. > :08:51.about 200 times a second, which is pretty quick. So, it loses loads of
:08:52. > :08:55.energy. So, they need to feed all the time. When a bumblebee leaves
:08:56. > :08:58.its nest, even if its stocked up - its tanks are full. If it doesn't
:08:59. > :09:02.find a flower within 40 minutes, then it's grounded, it can't fly
:09:03. > :09:05.again and that's the end of it basically. So if there aren't enough
:09:06. > :09:09.flowers, then bees are in trouble. One of my favourite passages in the
:09:10. > :09:12.book describes an experiment in which Dave dropped bees out of his
:09:13. > :09:18.car window to test their navigational skills in returning
:09:19. > :09:22.home. HE READS: 'Even from two or three kilometres, the bees would
:09:23. > :09:25.often be back within a few minutes, while I got caught up in the usual
:09:26. > :09:28.Southampton traffic (bees don't have to worry about such things).The
:09:29. > :09:31.record distance over which a bee successfully returned to the nest
:09:32. > :09:34.was 10 kilometres. I was very proud of Blue 36.'
:09:35. > :09:37.The distances bees regularly go, if you scale up into human terms, it's
:09:38. > :09:41.absolutely ridiculous, it's like, you know, going to a patch of
:09:42. > :09:44.flowers and back would be like us going to the moon and back to get
:09:45. > :09:47.our shopping. The book's clearly got a sort of
:09:48. > :09:50.campaigning aspect to it? I'm a conservationist really, and
:09:51. > :09:54.bees are really good things to work on for two reasons - one is that
:09:55. > :09:57.it's easy to explain to anyone why they should care because without
:09:58. > :10:04.bees we wouldn't have blueberries, tomatoes, strawberries, runner beans
:10:05. > :10:09.and chocolate and coffee. So, if we continue losing our bees, we run the
:10:10. > :10:13.risk of living a much poorer life. And the other thing is people can
:10:14. > :10:17.actually do something to help - the simplest thing to grow some flowers.
:10:18. > :10:29.Even in a window box you'll see bees arrive and start feeding and you're
:10:30. > :10:34.doing something to help. One of the joys of the Samuel
:10:35. > :10:38.Johnson Prize is its range. And so from the world of bees to that Queen
:10:39. > :10:42.Bee of a Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, the subject of Charles
:10:43. > :10:49.Moore's impressive biography. Our reviewer is broadcaster and former
:10:50. > :10:52.Prize Judge, James Naughtie. In April this year, the death was
:10:53. > :10:56.announced of one of the most important and controversial figures
:10:57. > :10:59.of modern politics. 'This morning's headlines:
:11:00. > :11:01.Preparations are continuing for Lady Thatcher's funeral?'
:11:02. > :11:03.'There's been further world reaction to the death of Lady Thatcher
:11:04. > :11:06.reflecting her divisive?' 'MPs and peers are preparing to
:11:07. > :11:08.discuss her political legacy...' 'The Prime Minister who changed
:11:09. > :11:11.Britain forever...' With Thatcher's death, it was time
:11:12. > :11:20.for the biography she didn't want published 'till she was gone. An
:11:21. > :11:23.authorised account of her life with the first of two volumes spanning
:11:24. > :11:29.nearly six decades from her childhood to the end of the
:11:30. > :11:33.Falklands War. I think for all of us, like myself,
:11:34. > :11:37.who watched her as a reporter or observer, she's not someone you can
:11:38. > :11:40.pin like a butterfly to the wall and stick in a glass case and say that's
:11:41. > :11:44.it, that's the whole story. The whole story will be told over
:11:45. > :11:47.generations. But what this does is to put many more layers of paint,
:11:48. > :11:51.and warts incidentally, on the portrait. I think it tells us more
:11:52. > :11:53.about her early life, her motivations, more about the paradox
:11:54. > :12:00.in her personality between the pragmatist and the idealogue.
:12:01. > :12:02.Margaret Thatcher herself gave her blessing, and access to all her
:12:03. > :12:10.papers, to conservative journalist Charles Moore - and left him to it.
:12:11. > :12:14.What impresses me most about it is that Charles Moore writes from a
:12:15. > :12:18.very committed point of view, a very conservative point of view. But he
:12:19. > :12:21.completely resists the temptation to give a head over heels in love
:12:22. > :12:24.picture of Margaret Thatcher - it's not like that at all.
:12:25. > :12:28.What's very striking about the book, really from the very beginning, is
:12:29. > :12:32.the work he's done with unlikely people. I mean, we have the old
:12:33. > :12:36.boyfriends of whom none of us had ever heard, and the whole story of
:12:37. > :12:39.the courtship, as it would have been called in those days, with Dennis.
:12:40. > :12:46.And that's the clue to the rest of the book. Because by the time
:12:47. > :12:49.Charles Moore gets onto her accession to the leadership, he's
:12:50. > :12:53.got brilliant control of his sources. He's spoken to everyone. To
:12:54. > :12:56.my mind, the book gives a razor-sharp insight into what
:12:57. > :12:59.politics is really like, how it feels.
:13:00. > :13:04.You get the smell of sawdust in the ring when he's talking about the
:13:05. > :13:07.leadership contest. A woman trying to command this man-built party and
:13:08. > :13:12.man-built Whitehall is riveting. He's very good on her flirtatious
:13:13. > :13:15.personality. I mean, you see something more than a stubborn Iron
:13:16. > :13:19.Lady knocking everyone aside, refusing to listen to anyone who she
:13:20. > :13:22.disagreed - and there was a bit of that in her personality as we all
:13:23. > :13:26.know. But there was also something much much more subtle and it's
:13:27. > :13:31.caught here. The climax of the book of course is
:13:32. > :13:34.the Falklands War. There's a very telling moment, the Falklands War
:13:35. > :13:42.has been won, and Charles Moore ends this book with a lovely picture of a
:13:43. > :13:48.dinner. HE READS: 'So many people had been
:13:49. > :13:52.invited to the dinner that there was no room for spouses at the table.
:13:53. > :13:55.Instead, they were invited for post-dinner drinks in the drawing
:13:56. > :13:59.rooms. Because all the main players in the Falklands crisis were men -
:14:00. > :14:02.you can say that again! Mrs Thatcher was the only woman at dinner. After
:14:03. > :14:06.the toasts, the Prime Minister rose in her seat again and said
:14:07. > :14:10."Gentlemen, shall we join the ladies?!" It may well have been the
:14:11. > :14:13.happiest moment of her life.' And that captures very well the way
:14:14. > :14:17.in which the Falklands set the seal on the first of her premierships and
:14:18. > :14:21.the way it turned it around; and also reminds us of the unlikely
:14:22. > :14:43.nature of her rise to power and the even more unlikely story of how she
:14:44. > :14:46.got a grip on it. The range of books on the Samuel
:14:47. > :14:53.Johnson Prize shortlist reveal how non-fiction is diversifying.
:14:54. > :14:57.There's been an exciting development in non-fiction in that writers don't
:14:58. > :15:04.feel a book needs to be pigeonholed into a certain type of genre. There
:15:05. > :15:11.seem to be no rules any more about what's allowable or justifiable for
:15:12. > :15:14.a writer to do. There's a desire for readers now to have an individual's
:15:15. > :15:17.take and what that is very overtly an individual's take on a subject
:15:18. > :15:24.rather than this distant, authoritative third person type of
:15:25. > :15:27.book. Several of the books on this year's
:15:28. > :15:32.shortlist reflect this more personal approach and revel in the journey a
:15:33. > :15:35.book can take you on. Amongst these is William Dalrymple's
:15:36. > :15:41.Return of a King, his riveting and brilliantly researched account of
:15:42. > :15:44.the First Afghan War. Critic, author and former Prize Judge, Diana
:15:45. > :15:49.Athill, has been appraising the book.
:15:50. > :15:52.Return of a King tells the story of the British invasion of Afghanistan
:15:53. > :16:00.in 1839 and its disastrous consequences.
:16:01. > :16:03.I think William Dalrymple has won me over completely because when he
:16:04. > :16:11.writes history he goes into it through people. And he then gives
:16:12. > :16:27.you the whole cast. You get the feeling you are actually going into
:16:28. > :16:31.the past, which is what I love. Things started to unravel for the
:16:32. > :16:35.British not long after the invasion. The Afghans rebelled, forcing the
:16:36. > :16:38.British to retreat. And in a last stand, hundreds of foot soldiers
:16:39. > :16:40.were killed. It was the biggest military
:16:41. > :16:46.humiliation the British had suffered.
:16:47. > :16:52.I've come to the Army and Navy club in London to meet William Dalrymple.
:16:53. > :16:56.Some of the stories in his book are quite hard to take, not least the
:16:57. > :17:02.story of the British revenge on the Afghans.
:17:03. > :17:07.One needs a pretty strong stomach to read what happened?
:17:08. > :17:10.The British behaved in Afghanistan in exactly the way Nazi storm
:17:11. > :17:14.troopers behaved in the Second World War. Villages are burnt down, men,
:17:15. > :17:17.women and children of any age are slaughtered on mass. They leave
:17:18. > :17:22.Kabul, this garden city, the main bazaar city of central Asia, a burnt
:17:23. > :17:26.ruin. And they withdraw. One feels very ashamed by it.
:17:27. > :17:29.There are good reasons to feel ashamed.
:17:30. > :17:35.I know there are tremendous parallels between then and now.
:17:36. > :17:37.What struck me over the last ten years, when the British and
:17:38. > :17:41.Americans went back into Afghanistan so foolishly - anyone who knows
:17:42. > :17:46.there history, knew it was going to end well - was to see history
:17:47. > :17:56.repeating itself. You have a war based on doctored intelligence,
:17:57. > :17:59.pushed by a bunch of hawks. As it goes on, the relevance to now
:18:00. > :18:04.becomes absolutely scorching. You feel you have to write so fast
:18:05. > :18:07.before it goes up all in smoke in front of you. There were lessons out
:18:08. > :18:09.there, which you were longing for people to read.
:18:10. > :18:12.What makes William's work so original is that he tells it from
:18:13. > :18:18.both sides, travelling to Afghanistan to uncover new sources
:18:19. > :18:22.and visit locations from the story. You were actually on the ground, you
:18:23. > :18:26.had to go into the same places - which can't have been too simple
:18:27. > :18:31.nowadays? Some places are terribly safe. Kabul
:18:32. > :18:34.itself is like a French finishing school, full of, you know, handsome
:18:35. > :18:37.Italian archaeologists and gorgeous French girls out digging, and
:18:38. > :18:41.working in NGOs. But you only have to go five miles outside the city
:18:42. > :18:46.and it's a very different world, it's the Wild West and you never
:18:47. > :18:52.know what's going to happen. As we left the airport, I had a sniper
:18:53. > :18:56.shot in the back window of my car. Immediately behind my head, as we
:18:57. > :18:58.were leaving the airport, you know within half-an-hour of arriving.
:18:59. > :19:02.In the book, the characters come under fire too when the British
:19:03. > :19:05.retreat en masse after the Afghan rebellion.
:19:06. > :19:07.It's the finest hour for one of my favourite personalities in the
:19:08. > :19:11.story, Lady Sale, the tough wife of a British General.
:19:12. > :19:14.Lady Sale... ...is splendid!
:19:15. > :19:18.If anyone makes a movie of this war, then Lady Sale has to be the
:19:19. > :19:22.heroine. And she is one of the best eyewitnesses for the terrible
:19:23. > :19:32.retreat. HE READS: 'We had not proceeded half
:19:33. > :19:36.a mile before we were fired upon. The pony my daughter rode was
:19:37. > :19:39.wounded in the ear and in the neck. I fortunately had only one musket
:19:40. > :19:42.ball in my arm. Three others passed through my coat, near the shoulder,
:19:43. > :19:45.without doing me any injury.' And these last British women get
:19:46. > :19:49.taken hostage the following night and are taken off. And Lady Sale
:19:50. > :19:53.eventually leads a jailbreak of the hostages and none of the men will
:19:54. > :19:57.help her and she drags the guns and says, "Do I have to do this on my
:19:58. > :20:01.own?" And she shoots dead the jailer - it's all very dramatic stuff. She
:20:02. > :20:05.has one of the great epitaphs of imperial history. It simply reads:
:20:06. > :20:11.'Here lies all that could die of Lady Sale'.
:20:12. > :20:15.Oh wonderful! From the wilds of Afghanistan, to a
:20:16. > :20:17.journey closer to home undertaken by Charlotte Higgins, whose outstanding
:20:18. > :20:24.book Under Another Sky explores our rich relationship with Roman
:20:25. > :20:31.Britain. Sam Leith is once more our guide.
:20:32. > :20:38.This is no ordinary book on Roman Britain. It involves a trip in a VW
:20:39. > :20:41.campervan. It's sort of part travelogue, part
:20:42. > :20:43.scholarship in which Charlotte Higgins, arts writer for the
:20:44. > :20:47.Guardian and her boyfriend, sort of schlepp around all over the UK in
:20:48. > :20:57.search of such Roman remains that there are. It's a kind of road trip,
:20:58. > :21:01.a Roman road trip. We have this preconceived idea that
:21:02. > :21:04.there was a point in which the Romans gave up, turned on their
:21:05. > :21:15.heels and hugged off and that was it. And instead she says there are
:21:16. > :21:19.all these hangovers from Rome. King Arthur, the Arthurian legend, which
:21:20. > :21:22.we think of as very English, are actually a folk memory of the Roman
:21:23. > :21:27.occupation. You could say: what have the Romans ever done for us? And it
:21:28. > :21:30.answers that question in spades. The book reveals how Roman Britain
:21:31. > :21:33.has fed our cultural imaginations from medieval writers to war poets
:21:34. > :21:37.and musicians. But Higgins also attempts to peel
:21:38. > :21:47.back all these layers of history to find the real Roman voices.
:21:48. > :21:50.There's a magical moment in the book when she is looking through some
:21:51. > :21:54.Roman letters - known as the Vindolanda tablets - in the British
:21:55. > :21:58.Museum. And she comes upon what could be the
:21:59. > :22:04.very first example of a woman's handwriting in the whole of history
:22:05. > :22:09.of Roman Empire. HE READS: 'The words Anima Mea
:22:10. > :22:12.Karissima, my dearest soul, may have been a bland formula but I none the
:22:13. > :22:18.less felt ambushed by the affection and sweetness in them. The years
:22:19. > :22:22.seemed to collapse as I read it, picking out the faint, spidery Latin
:22:23. > :22:26.on the dull wood. I read the words over and over again and thought of
:22:27. > :22:28.the lost life of the woman who wrote them.'
:22:29. > :22:31.Like a travel book, the chapters are arranged by region as Higgins
:22:32. > :22:46.journeys around the bleak, windswept outposts of Roman Britain.
:22:47. > :22:52.Colchester is a sort of key place in the book, as it's absolutely
:22:53. > :22:56.surrounded and full of Roman stuff. As she says, there's that sense of
:22:57. > :23:00.the Romans being here at the beginning and everything else
:23:01. > :23:03.building on top. It becomes a sort of model for exactly what she
:23:04. > :23:09.described in cities and towns all over the country.
:23:10. > :23:17.Every age finds the Rome it looks for in a sense. So to excavate Rome
:23:18. > :23:21.is to find a strange distorting mirror in which you see yourself.
:23:22. > :23:27.From ancient Britain we head to 20th Century Italy. Stella Tillyard has
:23:28. > :23:29.been reading Lucy Hughes-Hallett's The Pike, a brilliant biography of
:23:30. > :23:36.the controversial poet, Gabriele D'Annunzio.
:23:37. > :23:42.You can't imagine a more outlandish or multi-faceted character than the
:23:43. > :23:50.subject of this biography. D'Annunzio was a best-selling poet.
:23:51. > :23:55.A prolific writer. A dandy and a lothario. But he's also remembered
:23:56. > :23:58.for his politics of nationalism and blood sacrifice that inspired the
:23:59. > :24:02.Fascists who followed him. I think in the first place it's a
:24:03. > :24:06.real rollicking read of a really extravagant character that we
:24:07. > :24:09.perhaps don't know very much about. D'Annunzio leaps off the page as a
:24:10. > :24:13.larger-than-life character but she also shows the dark side of the man
:24:14. > :24:15.- a rabble-rousing, rhetorical figure, who concentrates attention
:24:16. > :24:19.to himself at times of economic stress - and Italy has thrown these
:24:20. > :24:22.up through the course of the 20th Century. First, Mussolini, then
:24:23. > :24:35.Berlusconi, but D'Annunzio was the first - and they're still coming.
:24:36. > :24:38.In my local Italian, I am meeting author Lucy Hughes-Hallett to talk
:24:39. > :24:47.about what she makes of her dangerously seductive character.
:24:48. > :24:51.He may be in many ways deplorable. But he's never dull. I repeatedly
:24:52. > :24:58.found myself saying - how can you say that? How can you think these
:24:59. > :25:01.thoughts? And it seems to me perhaps quite an interesting question, it is
:25:02. > :25:05.quite possible for people who hold abhorrent opinions to be charming.
:25:06. > :25:09.D'Annunzio was a deeply-cultured, widely-read, brilliant poet and, in
:25:10. > :25:13.general, he wasn't a brute. Except to women, maybe?
:25:14. > :25:17.Ah, yes, but women loved him. It takes two.
:25:18. > :25:21.Of course, there is all the time another side to him, there's a kind
:25:22. > :25:25.of emptiness, a dark side. Yes, well, D'Annunzio believed that
:25:26. > :25:29.war was a jolly good thing - it was virile, it was energetic, and a new
:25:30. > :25:33.nation - and of course Italy at the time was a brand-new nation -
:25:34. > :25:38.needed, he said, a baptism of blood. That's a very D'Annunzian concept.
:25:39. > :25:45.One thing you say is D'Annunzio is not a Fascist but Fascism was
:25:46. > :25:47.D'Annunzian. For one thing, Mussolini comes a
:25:48. > :25:50.generation after D'Annunzio, but it's not just politics that
:25:51. > :25:53.Mussolini learned from D'Annunzio, it's a way of doing politics - the
:25:54. > :25:56.importance of the parade, the spectacle, the songs, the uniforms,
:25:57. > :26:02.the ritual and ceremony of politics. So he understood politics as
:26:03. > :26:05.theatre. D'Annunzian politics reached its
:26:06. > :26:08.peak in 1918 when he took over a city called Fiume, in modern
:26:09. > :26:18.Croatia, declared it part of Italy and himself its ruler.
:26:19. > :26:23.SHE READS: 'He was welcomed into the city by rapturous crowds who had
:26:24. > :26:26.been up all night waiting for him. An officer, passing through the main
:26:27. > :26:29.square in the early hours of that morning, saw it filled with women,
:26:30. > :26:35.wearing evening dress and carrying guns. An image that nicely
:26:36. > :26:37.encapsulates the nature of the place. At once a phantasmogorical
:26:38. > :26:41.party and a battleground.' Certainly, he used it as a stage on
:26:42. > :26:46.which to project himself and made himself the star of the show.
:26:47. > :26:53.Without parallel in European, 20th Century European life.
:26:54. > :26:56.I think it is. D'Annunzio's influence is still
:26:57. > :27:07.felt, even here in London, where the local Italian church has a war
:27:08. > :27:11.memorial inscribed with his words. It says, "Non Invano Moriste - he
:27:12. > :27:15.didn't die in vain, O sweet sons of noble Latin blood."
:27:16. > :27:17.Well, this is a very typical D'Annunzian sentiment, combining
:27:18. > :27:23.blood and the idea of sacrificing yourself for your Fatherland. Here
:27:24. > :27:26.we are in a sacred setting outside a church so that the combination of
:27:27. > :27:45.religion, of slaughter and of beauty and poetry is something that
:27:46. > :27:49.D'Annunzio epitomises. Trying to pick one of these six
:27:50. > :27:53.books as the winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize is not a task I envy
:27:54. > :27:56.the judges. Almost impossible to do as they are all, in their own
:27:57. > :27:59.different ways, remarkable books. But ultimately they have to pick a
:28:00. > :28:03.winner, and I'm being asked to choose what I think would win this
:28:04. > :28:07.year and I'd like to pick William Dalrymple's Return of a King.
:28:08. > :28:09.I think he's managed to do something really extraordinary here. It's a
:28:10. > :28:12.book that I absolutely raced through, enjoying enormously as well
:28:13. > :28:16.as being fascinated by the things I was learning along the way. What he
:28:17. > :28:19.does is not only capture what happened then in a way that no-one
:28:20. > :28:23.has done previously, but he also reminds us how history repeats
:28:24. > :28:27.itself. And in that respect, he's written a book that's of its time,
:28:28. > :28:36.but of our time too, and I think that's a great achievement.
:28:37. > :28:39.If you're interested in who's won, the winner will be announced next
:28:40. > :28:46.week on 4th November.