From our UK edition
17 min listen
On this week's episode, broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby reads his diary (00:55), journalist Katja Hoyer reports on the German Greens and their poll surge (06:25) and Melissa Kite on why she's perfectly happy to stay in the country this summer (12:05).
From our UK edition
I have just had my second jab and it poses a dilemma. As an assiduous Covid rule-taker, I have been appalled by those — including friends and relatives — who have flouted or sidestepped the regulations and guidelines in the belief that they don’t apply to them. ‘We know we shouldn’t but it’s good for us’ or ‘We use our common sense’, they say. Since the issue is as incendiary as Brexit, I have fumed in silence. Of course the rules are anomalous and inadequately explained by ministers but I tend to trust the scientists. That said, the mantra ‘no one is safe until we are all safe’ is clearly nonsensical. Unlike those who are still waiting, I am now as safe as I am ever going to be. Hence my dilemma.
From our UK edition
42 min listen
My guest this week is the broadcaster and historian Jonathan Dimbleby. In Barbarossa: How Hitler Lost the War, Jonathan describes the extraordinary and horrifying story of the Nazi campaign against Stalin, and it's still more extraordinary strategic and diplomatic background. It's a bloody and sometimes tragicomic parable of how dictators can become detached from reality — and in it, he makes the case that, contra the prevailing image of Anglo-American victories in France having been decisive in winning the second world war, Hitler's goose was actually cooked as early as 1941.
From our UK edition
I usually spend most of the week at home in South Devon in front of my computer. But for the past five days I have been on the rampage. Or to be precise, I’ve been in London. It is an easy journey by train when the track at Dawlish doesn’t fall into the sea. Some of my fellow travellers wonder why High Speed 2 warrants £50 billion when the whole of the West Country can be cut off so easily. They are unimpressed by the line that this investment won’t stop Network Rail giving Devonians and the newly free Cornish the best rail service in the world. But then they weren’t born yesterday. I was at the Chelsea Flower Show, where I can report that Middle England is alive and well and living in dreams.
From our UK edition
As the result of a hip operation (arthritis, but I encourage people to think it was made necessary by a riding accident), I won’t be able to follow hounds again before the ban comes into force next Friday. I used to hunt as a child but gave up the chase in my ‘Ho Ho Ho Chi-Minh, we shall fight and we shall win’ chanting and marching days — by which time I had come to share Oscar Wilde’s feelings about ‘the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable’. But once the bandwagon for the ban started to roll in earnest I found myself with Voltaire and joined the fray once again in the belief that even unspeakables have rights.