Secrets of Great British Castles

So, what can fortification tell us about power around the world? My guest today is historian and broadcaster Dan Jones.

Dan is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Trustee of Historic Royal Palaces, and he's also the host of the This Is History podcast and the Secrets of Great British Castles documentary series.

Now in a new book, A Fortified History of the World, he explores across more than 3,000 years of castle history.

The book asks what these buildings reveal about warfare, status, survival and imagination.

And you can't really go anywhere in the Middle Ages without running into a castle.

So the technicalities of the castle, the political importance, the economic purpose, the changing designs of castles over the years have been a natural part of the stories that I've written and broadcast.

About 13 or 14 years ago, I was commissioned to make the television series you kindly mentioned in your introduction, which was called Secrets of Great British Castles, which proved to be...

I mean, it was great fun to make the show, but it proved to be a surprising, roaring runaway success.

And we come to, you know, it goes through the castles in Japan, the romantic and gothic era of castle building in Europe, the Middle Ages.

third system forts after the war of 1812 in america into the u.s civil war all the way up to the world wars and then it ends with nuclear bunkers so so it's got this epic scope to it and that's the kind of storytelling that i like you've also mentioned the tv show secrets of great british castles and i know a lot of people enjoyed that show we only ever made two seasons of it and there was a sort of unscratched itch if you like in my castle uh bothering and i wanted to sit For various boring reasons, that show was just, I think I've told you this before, it was hard to get a third season off the ground.

But I thought if I wrote a book, then it would kind of keep the castle thing alive.

At least give us hope.

I've been still, the weird and wonderful things rebound from that show.

I opened a copy of the New Yorker the other day and there's a profile of RuPaul, the drag queen.

The first line is, RuPaul watches Secrets of Great British Castles to help himself go to sleep.

How is this strange show that the commissioning editor told me was going to be career-ending for everyone involved ended up being like a sort of little history cultural phenomenon? But it has.