LAURENCE REES: Why should anybody bother to study history in general and this period in particular?

JULIET GARDINER: I think I would answer that as kind of 'why did the chicken cross the road?' I think it’s a very simple answer. You know, I never thought it was silly to answer the question why did you climb Mount Everest? With 'because it was there'. I think you study history because it happened. I really think that’s a very important thing, it’s part of the power of explanation, you want to know about everything, you want to know about other countries, you want to know about motivations, it’s all part of the power of explanation. If you want to understand the economy, politics, human motivation, the development of anything, you have to study history. Why do you study this period in particular? Because it happened.

Last century was one of the bloodiest and most dreadful. It’s very hard to say, there are loads of us who lived through part of the century obviously, but it was a very bloody and dreadful century. On the other hand I think the Second World War was an absolute watershed and I think it really was a real accelerator of history. I mean, there are all sorts of things that happened in the 30s; suddenly you had a command economy and a command society and therefore all sorts of things that had been in the air and tentative were given a focus and given a purpose, and that was able to be carried on into the peace.

I think the point of studying the Second World War is that it is such an intense period, it’s such an extraordinary period, it strips the soft tissue away from the structure of society and it shows its dynamics, it’s imperatives, it’s contingencies, it’s intricacies as they really are. And the other thing is that, and this is going to sound very unfashionable, partly you study it in homage. I don’t buy this thing that by studying the Second World War you’re living in the past, I don’t think that’s true at all, but I do think that you have to recognise that the Second World War made demands on people both in the military and on the home front which were totally extraordinary. They rose to those demands on the whole and in a very large sense, and they deserve that sort of commemoration. I think they do deserve us to try and know more about it, understand how it happened and understand why it happened.