And it feels oh-so-familiar, cosy even. Editor-at-large, Justin Doherty, and I began proceedings with the hour-long drive down from Somerset, a nervous sort of excitement as we discussed the line-up and prognosticated about just how searing it could get this week.
Passes collected, tent up, pitched on the curve of the chalk down, we head down to site to chat over bitter and a ham sandwich. Having only attended for the first time last year, already there are so many faces that I recall from last year. The Monday evening cast is overt in its effort to start events with a bang. Two of the heavyweights, festival supremo James Holland, resplendent in white suit, and the return of financier and Trump turncoat, Anthony Scaramucci, were hailed by punters and handshakes aplenty on their march towards the Guildhall venue.
Their talk, The Road to War: 1920s and 30s, very much doing what it says on the tin, was chocker and I settled down in the grass to watch on the big screen, head on backpack. I had been rather uncomplimentary about the American last year, his ‘orange wrecking ball’ shtick about his previous boss rather tedious, but, getting into the meat of US financial policy in the early 20th century from McKinley to FDR and its effect in the run-up to 1939, I gained a newfound respect for the way he managed to explain fiscal policy unfussily and engagingly. He and Holland (whose latest release The Visionaries: The Making of the Post-World War II Order in the West is featured in our June issue) have built a pleasant rapport in recent times, the Goalhanger effect, no doubt. It’s approachable and relevant, everything that is driving the popular history movement, not just on the page, but through headphones and at occasions such as these.
(N.B. I’m not just being complimentary because the UK’s fastest-growing company are currently advertising their traineeship scheme…)
Forever a glutton for punishment in the last week of June, Holland was on again after the supper break, spent agreeably as the threat of storm abated after a few heavy drops. This time he was mediating for former Minister of State for Security, Tom Tugendhat MP, and General Sir Nick Carter, Chief of the Defence Staff from 2018 to 2021. The Road to War: 100 Years On was a contemporary defence-oriented take on the alarming geopolitical goings-on, conducted with enough humour to sugar the doom-and-gloom pill being administered regarding the semantics of warfare today, Russian, Chinese, North Korean and Iranian interference, in combination with the antics of unreliable partners across the pond.
A serendipitous meet-up on the way out of the hour-long address with Jackson van Uden (aka History with Jackson) over a currywurst ended with chatter over beers until the wee hours the security guards gave the nod to head up the hill to the campsite. No bad thing to ease one’s way into it as the regimen of talks and weather hots up.
Zeb Baker-Smith is a Classics teacher based in Malawi, a freelance journalist and Editor at Aspects of History.
