Podcast appearances and mentions of Henry VIII

Henry VII's reign reaches the end of the line. After finally cementing an alliance with the Hapsburgs, Henry finally succumbs to tuberculosis. Richard Fox and Thomas Wolsey then help a young Henry VIII succeed his father - the first peaceful succession in England for one hundred years. England was lucky. Henry VII's former finance ministers... not so much.Website: www.westerncivpodcast.comPatreon: www.patreon.com/westerncivpodcastSubscription Feed Western Civ 2.0: www.glow.fm/westernciv

What do you get when you bring together five top historians in a room with bottles of Prosecco to debate Elizabeth I on screen? History with the gloves off - our first Not Just the Tudors Lates! Taking as her starting point the new series Becoming Elizabeth - now streaming on STARZ - Professor Suzannah Lipscomb is joined by Dr. Joanne Paul, Jessie Childs, Alex von Tunzelmann and Professor Sarah Churchwell to explore how television and films have depicted the year 1547 when - following the death of Henry VIII - a complex web of relationships determined the course of British history. *WARNING! There is some strong language in this episode*The Senior Producer was Elena Guthrie. It was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg. Audio extracts from Becoming Elizabeth courtesy of STARZ.For more Not Just The Tudors content, subscribe to our Tudor Tuesday newsletter here >If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android > or Apple store > Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

For centuries, the British royal crown and parliament have had a say over the distilling habits of the Irish. Where did it all start? I'll dive deep into the history to find an inception point for the control over distilling in Ireland.   Meanwhile, Alfred Barnard will find his way to the largest distillery in the world and I'll make two stops on my visit, including one involving two kinds of unforgettable fires.   Enjoy episode 4 of this Irish Whiskey journey.

It's 75 years since British India was split in two, but what does Partition mean today? Signalling the end of British colonial rule in the subcontinent, and leaving thousands dead and millions displaced – why are we not taught about it in schools? Ahir Shah discusses family histories and second generation identity with fellow British-Asian comedian Eshaan Akbar.  Complete our listener survey for a chance to win a Bunker t-shirt: https://bit.ly/3zFSySB “All you are taught at school is: Henry VIII was a bit of a legend, then World War Two.” – Ahir Shah “Wounds created in 1947 remained open and festering for decades.” – Ahir Shah “You have these two senses of us in your head - I can't believe WE did this to US.” – Ahir Shah https://www.patreon.com/bunkercast  Presented by Ahir Shah. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Lead Producer: Jacob Jarvis. Producers: Jacob Archbold, Jelena Sofronijevic and Alex Rees. Assistant Producer: Kasia Tomasiewicz. Music by Jade Bailey. Audio production by Jade Bailey The Bunker is a Podmasters Production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

King Henry VII decides he wants to play with the big boys on the continent while a freak storm finally delivers the Earl of Suffolk into his grasp.Website: www.westerncivpodcast.comPatreon: www.patreon.com/westerncivpodcastSubscription Feed: www.glow.fm/westernciv

In this second part on the English Reformation we look at the role that Henry VIIIs heirs play in the Reformation with special emphasis on Queen Elizabeth. Do you want to get that 5?  Enter code “GO4FIVE” at checkout for 25% OFF the Lyndeurozone Online Resources! Lyndeurozone.com  Patreon If you use this podcast regularly would you please consider supporting us on Patreon for as little as a dollar a month?  The Euro Simplified Podcast has no advertising revenue and is produced by a public school teacher.  We love and appreciate our supporters on Patreon as our supporters help us meet the costs associated with the production of this free resource for students. Episodes will be released on the following schedule: Unit 1 and Unit 2 - August/September Unit 3: October Unit 4: November Unit 5: November and December Unit 6: January Unit 7: Late January & February Unit 8 : March Unit 9: April   If you have any questions you can contact Robert Lynde at Lyndeurozone.com.   Instagram: @Lyndeurozone

The Ambassadors painting by Hans Holbein reveals the French horror at Henry's decision in January 1533 to defy the pope and get remarried to a pregnant Anne Boleyn. But since Henry couldn't get an annulment he had no choice. No big-time European princess would marry him. With the Spanish seriously weakened by war, Turkish invasion and protestant revolt in Germany, and Henry's French allies now needing him more than he does them, Henry's long game to get the Pope on side against the Spanish is now in extra time. Henry is free to make himself head of the Church in England.

The Protestant Reformation definitely has a political side and in this episode we look at how Henry VIII of England will use the Reformation for his political gain. Do you want to get that 5?  Enter code “GO4FIVE” at checkout for 25% OFF the Lyndeurozone Online Resources! Lyndeurozone.com  Patreon If you use this podcast regularly would you please consider supporting us on Patreon for as little as a dollar a month?  The Euro Simplified Podcast has no advertising revenue and is produced by a public school teacher.  We love and appreciate our supporters on Patreon as our supporters help us meet the costs associated with the production of this free resource for students. Episodes will be released on the following schedule: Unit 1 and Unit 2 - August/September Unit 3: October Unit 4: November Unit 5: November and December Unit 6: January Unit 7: Late January & February Unit 8 : March Unit 9: April   If you have any questions you can contact Robert Lynde at Lyndeurozone.com.   Instagram: @Lyndeurozone

Henry VIII's third wife will take us on a journey through all things fertility and childbirth during the Tudor period: getting pregnant, staying pregnant, and getting through the delivery ordeal in (we hope) one piece. For this episode's show notes, including a transcript and tons of images, go to The Exploress website. To support the show, become a patron. 

Part 26 Reformation 3 - England Here We Come! We are now in England in the early 16th century! However Protestantism had commenced earlier in the 14th century with John Wyclif who we looked at back in episode 22. Wyclif was the 'Morning Star of the English Reformation', who had a great desire to ensure that the Bible was made available to everyone in their own language. So a strong evangelical protest started with Wyclif. King Henry VIII  In the late 1520s King Henry 8th as head of the Roman Catholic Church in England, broke away from the Church in Rome. He broke away because he wanted a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, which Pope Clement VII refused to accept. Earlier, in the year 1521, Clement had recognised Henry as the 'Defender of the Faith' for his writings against Martin Luther. Pope Clement VII was known for his intolerance of Protestants and his main method of evangelisation was through coercion and force if necessary. In 1531 Henry prevented the English clergy from dealing with Rome under an Act of Parliament labelling this as treason. In 1534 Henry was made the 'Supreme Head of the Church of England' by the parliament. However he remained Roman Catholic in practice and doctrine. In 1532 made Thomas Cranmer the Archbishop of Canterbury – the clerical head of the Church of England. Reformation in England however continued unabated. Thomas Cranmer was a reformer and was helped by many of the Reformers driven from Europe by the Roman Catholic attacks on the Protestants. William Tyndale translated the New Testament into English and this made a significant impact. Edward VI (1547-1553) became the king at the age of 10, and ruled for 6 years. He was well trained by Cranmer. He allowed religious freedom, and he published with the help of Cranmer, the 1st and 2nd Prayer Books. Then there was a change back again! Mary Tudor "Queen Bloody Mary" (1553-1558). Mary was a fanatical Roman Catholic and set out to re-establish the Roman Catholic Church. She put to death many bishops including Cranmer. She marred Charles V son (Spain) to bring all of Christendom under Spanish power. In 1554, she resubmitted England to Papal authority. Queen Elizabeth (1559-1603). As a daughter of Henry VIII second wife, Anne Boleyn, she was not recognised by the Pope. She was not in full agreement with the Reforming Protestants, but maintained Protestant leanings. She influenced preparation of the 39 Articles of Communion, largely prepared by Cranmer, which were less reformed as a result. In 1559, she became 'Governor of the Church of England'. She defeated the Spanish Armada, with the help of Sir Francis Drake, who were attacking in order to bring England back under Spanish and Roman Catholic control. This strengthened the Protestant cause in England. The main issue in the 14th to 16th centuries, as we have seen was 'None but Christ saves'. That is, that the Gospel is good news for all of humanity. Nobody can earn their salvation, but rather salvation is a free gift from God for all those who choose to receive it. This is a far cry from the excesses of Church dogma to date and closer to the teachings of Jesus Christ and the early church. Tap or Click here to download/save this as an audio mp3 file

Today, we look at Henry VIII and the mess he made of both his marriages and the church, and the good that God would make from it. This is part of an ongoing series during Crossway's Sunday School reviewing church history.

The extraordinary stories of Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, and Katherine Parr, their marriages to the notorious King Henry VIII, and how they ended up memorialised in the rhyme Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived. Content warning: This episode contains frequent discussions of miscarriages and fertility struggles, which some listeners may find distressing.

The deaths of Prince Arthur and Queen Elizabeth decisively change Henry VII's reign. With only the young Henry VIII between the earl of Suffolk and the throne, Henry VII becomes increasingly paranoid and preoccupied with protecting his dynasty. To do this to turn to a new financial counselor: Edmund Dudley. Website: www.westerncivpodcast.comPatreon: www.patreon.com/westerncivpodcastWestern Civ 2.0 Subscriber Feed: www.glow.fm/westernciv

Having spent some time on Henry VIII for Sunday's episode, Alicia decided to highlight a truly terrible female monarch. Russian history has no shortage of bad rulers, but for sheer cavalier and capricious sadism, Empress Anna's 18th century reign of terror sets her apart as (perhaps) Russia's worst empress. Sponsors Dipsea. Get 30 days of full access to steamy stories for free when you go to dipseastories.com/trashy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Henry the Eighth is getting a historical make-over. For centuries, the English king was most often a figure of ridicule. The only thing that most people knew about him pertained to his deplorable marital history. However, some historians are reconsidering his role in English history, looking at him in a far more favorable light. They paint him as a figure who made England stronger abroad and more unified at home. Even his horrible record as a husband is explained away as necessary to maintain the Tudor dynasty and stabilize England by providing a male heir. There is another interesting – and ironic – facet of Henry's rehabilitation. Some try to present him as a pioneer of the modern idea of separating the Church from the State. For the “woke” historians, the Catholic Church is high on the list of oppressors. Therefore, they are quite willing to praise a tyrant, as long as he fought against the Church. This episode of the Return to Order Moment looks at Henry VIII from a different vantage point – that of his victims. Specifically, we look at two of those victims – both better men than Henry. They are, in fact, both saints – Saint Thomas More and Saint John Fisher.

Henry Tudor used the legends of the Welsh red dragon and King Arthur to establish the Tudor dynasty.Show Notes:Carol Ann Lloydwww.carolannlloyd.com@shakeuphistorypatreon.com/carolannlloydCreative Director: Lindsey LindstromMusic: Inspiring Dramatic Pack by Smart Sounds via Audio Jungle; Music Broadcast License

Arthur Sullivan - Henry VIII: Water Music RTE Concert Orchestra Andrew Penny, conductor More info about today's track: Naxos 8.555181 Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc. Subscribe You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, or by using the Daily Download podcast RSS feed. Purchase this recording Amazon

We couldn't possibly have a season of Trashy Divorces All-Stars without dishing some dirt about the real King of Trash, England's Henry VIII. While we covered his six wives all the way back at the beginning in 2019, today Alicia has the dirty details of Henry's many mistresses, and other extracurricular enjoyments. Want early, ad-free episodes, limited series, Zoom hangouts, and more? Join us at patreon.com/trashydivorces! Sponsors The Oak Tree Group. Mention Trashy Divorces for your free one hour financial preparedness conversation. Call 770-319-1700 or visit them on the web at theoaktreegroup.net. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a dynamite French document from August 1530, still overlooked by historians, the King of France offers to send troops to England to defend Henry VIII against the Spanish. No French government before or since has ever promised to send troops to defend England. Does this explain Henry's sudden move in August 1530 to go on the offensive against Rome and the clergy in England and end the comfortable ménage à trois with his wife and his mistress, Anne?

Anne of Cleves was the ‘last woman standing' of Henry VIII's wives and the only one buried in Westminster Abbey. How did she manage it? Was she in fact a political refugee, supported by the King? Was she a role model for her step-daughters Mary and Elizabeth? Why was her marriage to Henry doomed from the start?In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb is joined by author Heather R. Darsie - editor of maidensandmanuscripts.com - whose research into Anne of Cleves casts a new light on Henry's fourth Queen, potentially revealing a very different figure than the so-called 'Flanders Mare'.For this episode, the Senior Producer was Elena Guthrie. It was edited by Thomas Ntinas and produced by Rob Weinberg.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week I'm previewing my upcoming book, The Tudors by the Numbers! How did Henry Tudor manage to become King of England and start a dynasty? It begins with the number 1.Show Notes:Carol Ann Lloydwww.carolannlloyd.com@shakeuphistorypatreon.com/carolannlloydhttps://issuu.com/historywithrosie/docs/the_historians_magazine_edition_7_all_things_tudor (my article about the Tudor Rose)Creative Director: Lindsey LindstromMusic: Inspiring Dramatic Pack by Smart Sounds via Audio Jungle; Music Broadcast License

In this latest episode, the Unexpected duo, Professor James Daybell and Dr Sam Willis head outdoors and pitch camp in order to savour the unexpected history of TENTS! Which is all about ancient Rome and the Dacian campaign recorded on Trajan's Column in Rome, the Industrial Revolution, nomadism, and the American Civil War. It's also all about Tudor glamping, Henry VIII and the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and Roald Amundsen and the journeying to the South Pole (and the current location of his expedition, the Fram)! Who knew! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The premise of “Six,” the smash Broadway hit is this:  Henry the VIII's wives are in concert and ready to compete for the title of the queen with the most tragic circumstances. To win, each wife, a singer in this all-girl pop band, will tell her story through a featured song while the other queens sing back-up. Anne Boleyn's song is called “Don't Lose Ur Head.”  Need we say more? This fun, empowering musical reimagines history– referring to itself as a “historemix”-- and one way it does so is by modeling each queen after two current pop stars, called the “Queenspirations.”  In this episode Candy and Ashley touch on the history of each of Henry VIII's wives as compared to her representation in the musical “Six.” You'll also hear the circumstances that led two college students to create this “global sensation,” and how they brought the musical –and these strong women, who tended to be downplayed or sometimes even vilified by history– to life.

Rachel and Simon speak with the historian and novelist Antonia Fraser. She began her career in the 1950s as an assistant to George Weidenfeld, the co-founder of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a British publishing house. Lady Antonia wrote her first book, "King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table", in her early twenties; her first major historical work, "Mary Queen of Scots", was published in 1969. Since then she has written biographies of Oliver Cromwell, Charles II, the six wives of Henry VIII and Marie Antoinette, the last of which was adapted into a film directed by Sofia Coppola and starred Kirsten Dunst. She has also written two volumes of autobiography, including "Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter". Lady Antonia has served as President of English PEN and Chairman of the Society of Authors. We spoke with her about the success of "Mary Queen of Scots", her research process and her new book, "The Case of the Married Woman". This episode is sponsored by Curtis Brown Creative, the writing school attached to the major literary agency. CBC has provided an exclusive discount for Always Take Notes listeners. You can use the code ATN20 for £20 off the full price of Writing a Memoir, or any other four- or six-week online writing course. You can find us online at alwaystakenotes.com, on Twitter @takenotesalways and on Instagram @alwaystakenotes. Our crowdfunding page is patreon.com/alwaystakenotes. Always Take Notes is presented by Simon Akam and Rachel Lloyd, and produced by Artemis Irvine. Our music is by Jessica Dannheisser and our logo was designed by James Edgar.

This Man Booker Prize-winning novel has one question at its core: what if Thomas Cromwell wasn't quite the jerk we thought he was? Henry VIII's right-hand man definitely does dirty deeds on behalf of the King, but Mantel creatively fills in blanks in the historical record to imagine a man who wasn't so bad. Our theme music was composed by Nick Lerangis. Advertise on Overdue See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

 In today's episode, we will be talking about how to fold paper will make the world better.Postal bulletinPony Cars and as many California State Fair postmarks as your heart could desirehttps://about.usps.com/postal-bulletin/2022/pb22602/html/info_007.htmUSPS doubles EV order to 2 vehicles (jk) was 5K now 10Khttps://electrek.co/2022/07/20/us-postal-service-ev/Industrial origamihttps://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2022/04/23/startup-uses-industrial-origami-technique-to-build-electric-motorbikes/50504/https://www.yankodesign.com/2022/04/04/foldable-origami-cup-can-transform-into-a-flat-disc-making-it-easier-to-carry-with-you/https://www.labmanager.com/news/using-origami-and-kirigami-to-inspire-reconfigurable-yet-structural-materials-28152Here are the two links: from friend of the show RichardDecoding the Defiance of Henry VIII's First Wife (New York Times)https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/07/arts/ciphers-henry-viii-catherine.htmlA letter from Queen Anne to Buckingham locked with silk embroidery floss (The Collation at Folger Library)https://collation.folger.edu/2013/01/a-letter-from-queen-anne-to-buckingham-locked-with-silk-embroidery-floss/TPA silent auctionhttps://www.chrono24.com/omega/pocket-watch-pocket-watch-limited-edition-of-15-pieces--id23641189.htm https://www.richardmille.com/collections/mechanical-fountain-pen 

On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Dr. Judge Glock about the case for optimism in America in 2022. An economic historian by training, Glock is a Chief Policy Officer at the Cicero Institute. Though public polling shows that 80% of Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the nation, Glock really doesn't share the sentiment, and he puts forward a case for sunny optimism in the historical and geographical context. In short, it turns out that for the vast majority of human history our species was living at the Malthusian level, and today Americans pursuing the consumer lifestyle never consider simple subsistence sufficient. Glock's contention is that we live like kings, and we should appreciate this. In fact, the poorest Americans have access to miraculous technologies that would have amazed Henry VIII. Glock also points out that China, and much of the developed world, has lower fertility than the US, and we are the world's number one magnet for skilled immigrants. In the great positional game of power, Glock reckons that the US has a good shot purely due to its demographic profile. Moving beyond economics and onto culture, Razib and Glock discuss the differences between the present and past of American society and argue about whether the US is quite as decadent as many argue. After all, rates of teen pregnancy are down, and crime is nothing like it was in the 1970's, so perhaps our best days aren't behind us?  

Today we will be talking about Edward VI, Henry VIII's only son and successor and Lady Jane Grey (Or is it Queen Jane? I'll leave it for you to decide.)Sources:https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-VIhttps://tudortimes.co.uk/politics-economy/tudor-succession-problem/edward-vi#:~:text=Edward%20began%20to%20fear%20that,out%20to%20be%20completely%20justified.https://www.royal.uk/edward-vihttps://www.englishmonarchs.co.uk/tudor_6.htmhttps://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp04043/thomas-seymour-baron-seymour#:~:text=Intensely%20ambitious%2C%20and%20jealous%20of,treason%20in%201549%20and%20beheaded.https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/lady-jane-grey/#gs.661bfdhttps://www.britannica.com/biography/Lady-Jane-Greyhttps://youtu.be/5pT6hHLqdWAMusic:Medieval Loop One, Secret Garden, and Celebration by Alexander Nakarada | https://www.serpentsoundstudios.comMusic promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.comAttribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Support the show

Henry Tudor defeats Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field to become Henry VII. But he is immediately beset by various pretenders to the throne leading to the question: were the Wars of the Roses truly over?Website: www.westerncivpodcast.comAd-Free Patreon Epsidoes: www.patreon.com/westerncivpodcastPremium Feed: www.glow.fm/westernciv

We're celebrating Christmas in July!This week, we experience tournaments and treats, Tudor style!Show Notes:Carol Ann Lloydwww.carolannlloyd.com@shakeuphistorypatreon.com/carolannlloydCreative Director: Lindsey LindstromMusic: Inspiring Dramatic Pack by Smart Sounds via Audio Jungle; Music Broadcast License

31 May 1529: Faced with France and Spain doing a deal and leaving England in the lurch, Henry races against time to begin his divorce trial in London, and then pulls the plug just before a verdict is reached. Meanwhile the pope and his cardinals are double-crossing each other.

The Tyranny of Henry VIII with Jackson van Uden In this episode of All Things Tudor, historian-educator-podcaster Jackson van Uden discusses the reign of Henry VIII and the king's tyranical nature. Take a deep dive into the many dates that mark Henry's despotic actions during his reign. Twitter: @historywjackson Connect with us: https://allthingstudor.com/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/AllThingsTudor https://www.facebook.com/TheDebATL

Who Was Henry XIII? Join us today as we learn about a man who was not supposed to be a king but was. Sources: https://www.history.com/topics/british-history/henry-viii https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-VIII-king-of-England/Legacy Send us listener mail! Send an audio message: anchor.fm/inquisikids-daily/message Send an email: podcast@inquisikids.com

Anne of Cleves was the ‘last woman standing' of Henry VIII's wives and the only one buried in Westminster Abbey. How did she manage it? Was she in fact a political refugee, supported by the King? Was she a role model for her step-daughters Mary and Elizabeth? Why was her marriage to Henry doomed from the start?In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb is joined by author Heather R. Darsie - editor of maidensandmanuscripts.com - whose research into Anne of Cleves casts a new light on Henry's fourth Queen, potentially revealing a very different figure than the so-called 'Flanders Mare'.For this episode, the Senior Producer was Elena Guthrie. It was edited by Thomas Ntinas and produced by Rob Weinberg.For more Not Just The Tudors content, subscribe to our Tudor Tuesday newsletter here >If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android > or Apple store > See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This is our last podcast before our summer break, so we've selected some of our favourite conversations of the last year. ART: We celebrate Patrick Hughes's birthday, talk to Tracey Emin about battling cancer and to gallerist James Burch about drinking with Francis Bacon. BOOKS: Rose Tremain tells us about her novel ‘Lily', Barbara Taylor Bradford explains how she found inspiration to write the prequel to ‘A Woman of Substance', Ben Okri inspires to see trees in a totally new light, we discuss culture wars with Bernardine Evaristo and lyricist Don Black, while talking at Jewish Book Week, makes us laugh. THEATRE: We talk to playwright David Hare about ‘Straight Line Crazy' and the death of the avant garde, actor Nathaniel Parker about playing Henry VIII in Hilary Mantel's ‘The Mirror and the Light', Nick Allott from Cameron Mackintosh regales us with hilarious theatrical anecdotes and Creative Director of the Young Vic, Kwame Kwei-Armah, praises playwright James Graham. HISTORY: Andrew Roberts tells us about George III and A.N. Wilson explains how our Trafalgar Square Christmas tree was a gift from the King of Norway during World War II. MUSIC and DANCE: We talk to ballet-dancer Marcelino Sambé about playing Romeo in Kevin McMillan's ballet, to choreographer Matthew Bourne about his stellar career, to soprano Anush Hovvanisyan about all the Armenians at the Royal Opera House and playing Violetta in Richard Eyre's ‘Traviata' and finally Dylan Jones, polymath and long-standing editor of GQ, tells us what David Bowie was really like. Enjoy the summer. Ed and Charlotte will be back on Sunday September 11th September.

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2022. Every day this week, I'll be posting old Patreon bonus episodes of the podcast which will have this short intro. These are short, ten- to twenty-minute bonus podcasts which get posted to Patreon for my paying backers every time I post a new main episode -- there are well over a hundred of these in the archive now. If you like the sound of these episodes, then go to patreon.com/andrewhickey and subscribe for as little as a dollar a month or ten dollars a year to get access to all those bonus episodes, plus new ones as they appear. Click below for the transcript Transcript Today's backer-only episode is an extra-long one -- it runs about as long as some of the shorter main episodes -- but it also might end up containing material that gets repeated in the main podcast at some point, because a lot of British rock and pop music gets called, often very incorrectly, music-hall, and so the subject of the music halls is one that may well have to be explained in a future episode. But today we're going to look at one of the very few pop hits of the sixties that is incontrovertibly based in the music-hall tradition -- Herman's Hermits singing "I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am": [Excerpt: Herman's Hermits, "I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am"] The term "music hall" is one that has been widely misused over the years. People talk about it as being a genre of music, when it's anything but. Rather, the music hall -- which is the British equivalent of the American vaudeville -- was the most popular form of entertainment, first under that name and then under the name "variety", for more than a century, only losing its popularity when TV and rock-and-roll between them destroyed the market for it. Even then, TV variety shows rooted in the music hall continued, explicitly until the 1980s, with The Good Old Days, and implicitly until the mid-1990s. As you might imagine, for a form of entertainment that lasted over a hundred years, there's no such thing as "music-hall music" as a singular thing, any more than there exists a "radio music" or a "television music". Many music-hall acts were non-musical performers -- comedians, magicians, acrobats, and so forth -- but among those who did perform music, there were all sorts of different styles included, from folk song to light opera, to ragtime, and especially minstrel songs -- the songs of Stephen Foster were among the very first transatlantic hits. We obviously don't have any records from the first few decades of the music hall, but we do have sheet music, and we know that the first big British hit song was "Champagne Charlie", originally performed by George Leybourne, and here performed by Derek B Scott, a professor of critical musicology at the university of Leeds: [Excerpt: Derek B. Scott, "Champagne Charlie"] If you've ever heard the phrase "the Devil has all the best tunes", that song is why. William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, set new lyrics to it and made it into a hymn, and when asked why, he replied "Why should the Devil have all the good tunes?" The phrase had been used earlier, but it was Booth who popularised it. "Champagne Charlie" also has rather morbid associations, because it was sung by the crowd at the last public execution in Britain, so it often gets used in horror and mystery films set in Victorian London, so chances are if you recognised the song it's because you've heard it in a film about Jack the Ripper or Jekyll and Hyde. But the music hall, like all popular entertainment, demanded a whole stream of new material. The British Tin Pan Alley publishers and songwriters who wrote much of the early British rock and roll we've looked at started out in music hall, and almost every British popular song up until the rise of jazz, and most after that until the fifties, was performed in the music halls. We do have recordings from the later part of the music-hall era, of course, and they show what a wide variety of music was performed there, from pitch-black comedy songs like "Murders", by George Grossmith, the son of the co-writer of Diary of a Nobody: [Excerpt: George Grossmith, "Murders"] To sing-along numbers like "Waiting at the Church" by Vesta Victoria: [Excerpt: Vesta Victoria, "Waiting at the Church"] And one of the most-recorded music-hall performers, Harry Champion, a London performer who sang very wordy songs, at a fast tempo, usually with a hornpipe rhythm and often about food, like "A Little Bit of Cucumber" or his most famous song "Boiled Beef and Carrots": [Excerpt: Harry Champion, "Boiled Beef and Carrots"] But one that wasn't about food, and was taken a bit slower than his normal patter style, was "I'm Henry the VIII I Am": [Excerpt: Harry Champion, "I'm Henry VIII, I Am"] (Incidentally, the song as written on the sheet music has "Henery" rather than "Henry", and most people sing it "Enery", but the actual record by Champion uses "Henry" on the label, as does the Hermits' version, so that's what I'm going with). Fifty years after Champion, the song was recorded by Joe Brown. We've talked about Brown before in the main podcast, but for those of you who don't remember, he's one of the best British rock and roll musicians of the fifties, and still performing today, and he has a real love of pre-war pop songs, and he would perform them regularly with his band, the Bruvvers. Those of you who've heard the Beatles performing "Sheikh of Araby" on their Decca audition, they're copying Brown's version of that song -- George Harrison was a big fan of Brown. Brown's version of "I'm Henry the Eighth I Am" gave it a rock and roll beat, and dropped the verse, leaving only the refrain: [Excerpt: Joe Brown and the Bruvvers, "I'm Henry the Eighth I Am"] Enter Herman's Hermits, four years later. In 1964, Herman's Hermits, a beat group from Manchester led by singer Peter Noone, had signed with Mickie Most and had a UK number one with "I'm Into Something Good", a Goffin and King song originally written for Earl-Jean of the Cookies: [Excerpt: Herman's Hermits, "I'm Into Something Good"] That would be their only UK number one, though they'd have several more top ten hits over here. It only made number thirteen in the US, but their second US single (not released as a single over here), "Can't You Hear My Heartbeat", went to number two in the States. From that point on, the group's career would diverge enormously between the US and the UK -- half their US hits were never released as singles in the UK, and vice versa. Several records, like their cover version of Sam Cooke's "Wonderful World", were released in both countries, but in general they went in two very different directions. In the UK they tended to release fairly normal beat-group records like "No Milk Today", written by Graham Gouldman, who was also writing hits for the Yardbirds and the Hollies: [Excerpt: Herman's Hermits, "No Milk Today"] That only charted in the US when it was later released as a B-side. Meanwhile, in the US, they pursued a very different strategy. Since the "British Invasion" was a thing, and so many British bands were doing well in the States partly because of the sheer novelty of them being British, Herman's Hermits based their career on appealing to American Anglophiles. This next statement might be a little controversial, even offensive to some listeners, so I apologise, but it's the truth. There is a large contingent of people in America who genuinely believe that they love Britain and British things, but who have no actual idea what British culture is actually like. They like a version of Britain that has been constructed entirely from pop-culture aimed at an American market, and have a staggeringly skewed vision of what Britain is actually like, one that is at best misguided and at worst made up of extremely offensive stereotypes. People who think they know all about the UK because they've spent a week going round a handful of tourist traps in central London and they've watched every David Tennant episode of Doctor Who. (Please note that I am not, here, engaging in reflex anti-Americanism, as so many British people do on this topic, because I know very well that there is an equally wrong kind of British person who worships a fictional America which has nothing to do with the real country -- as any American who has come over to the UK and seen cans of hot dog sausages in brine with "American style" and an American flag on the label will shudderingly attest. Fetishising of a country not one's own exists in every culture, and about every culture, whether it's American weebs who think they know about Japan or British Communists who were insistent that the Soviet Union under Stalin was a utopia). For their US-only singles, most of which were massive hits, Herman's Hermits played directly to that audience. The group's first single in this style was "Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter", written by the actor Trevor Peacock, now best known for playing Jim in The Vicar of Dibley, but at the time best known as a songwriter for groups like the Vernons Girls and  for writing linking material for Six-Five Special and Oh Boy! That song was written for a TV play and originally performed by the actor Tom Courtenay: [Excerpt: Tom Courtenay, "Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter"] The Hermits copied Courtenay's record closely, down to Noone imitating Courtenay's vocals: [Excerpt: Herman's Hermits, "Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter"] That became their first US number one, and the group went all-in on appealing to that particular market. Noone started singing, not in the pseudo-American style that, say, Mick Jagger sings in (and early-sixties Jagger is a perfect example of the British equivalent of those American Anglophiles, loving but not understanding Black America), and not in his own Manchester accent, but in a faked Cockney accent, doing what is essentially a bad impersonation of Anthony Newley. (Davy Jones, who like Noone was a Mancunian who had started his career in the Manchester-set soap opera Coronation Street, was also doing the same thing at the time, in his performances as the Artful Dodger in the Broadway version of Oliver! -- we'll talk more about Jones in future episodes of the main podcast, but he, like Noone, was someone who was taking aim at this market.) Noone's faked accent varied a lot, sometimes from syllable to syllable, and on records like "Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter" and the Hermits' version of the old George Formby song "Leaning on a Lamp Post" he sounds far more Northern than on other songs -- fitting into a continuum of Lancashire novelty performers that stretched at least from Formby's father, George Formby senior, all the way to Frank Sidebottom. But on the Hermits' version of "I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am", Noone is definitely trying to sound as London as he can, and he and the group copy Joe Brown's arrangement: [Excerpt: Herman's Hermits, "I'm Henry the Eighth I Am"] That also became an American number one, and Herman's Hermits had truly found their niche. They spent the next three years making an odd mixture of catchy pop songs by writers like Graham Gouldman or PF Sloan, which became UK hits, and the very different type of music typified by "I'm Henry the Eighth I Am". Eventually, though, musical styles changed, and the group stopped having hits in either country. Peter Noone left the group in 1971, and they made some unsuccessful records without him before going on to the nostalgia circuit. Noone's solo career started relatively successfully, with a version of David Bowie's "Oh! You Pretty Things", backed by Bowie and the Spiders From Mars: [Excerpt: Peter Noone, "Oh! You Pretty Things"] That made the top twenty in the UK, but Noone had no further solo success. These days, there are two touring versions of Herman's Hermits -- in the US, Noone has toured as "Herman's Hermits featuring Peter Noone", with no other original members, since the 1980s. Drummer Barry Whitwham and lead guitarist Derek Leckenby kept the group going in the rest of the world until Leckenby's death in 1994 -- since then Whitwham has toured as Herman's Hermits without any other original members. Herman's Hermits may not have the respect that some of their peers had, but they had incredible commercial success at their height, made some catchy pop records, and became the first English group to realise there was a specific audience of Anglophiles in the US that they could market to. Without that, much of the subsequent history of music might have been very different.

In this episode we head much further back in time than we have ever dared before for an Iconic Ship…to find out about Henry V's ship Grace Dieu, launched in 1418. And what a ship she was...Henry only reigned for ten years but in those years he worked harder than any of his predecessors to build a navy designed to destroy French seapower. His ships were not just barges designed for transporting armies to France, but great warships built for prestige and power. It is during Henry V's time as king that one of the finest of all medieval warships, Grace Dieu, was constructed. Contemporary descriptions marvelled at its size, and modern historians were cynical until her wreck in the River Hamble near Southampton was surveyed. These investigations proved that her mainmast was 200ft tall: she was nearly three times larger than Henry VIII's Mary Rose which was built nearly a century later, and no warship that rivalled her for size was built for another 200 years. To find out more about this remarkable feat of construction and the vision to attempt something apparently impossible, Dr Sam Willis spoke with Susan Rose, a legend in the world of medieval maritime and naval history. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

1527: The pope is a prisoner of the marauding Spanish in Rome and yet Henry sends his man Knight on a madcap mission to ask Pope Clement VII for permission to marry a young woman he is already sleeping with. It's the first of a whole series of crazy errands, asking the pope for the impossible. Does Henry have a hidden agenda?

July 19, 1545. The English warship, the Mary Rose, sinks during a battle against the invading French army. The fate of the Mary Rose was a mystery that has lasted hundreds of years -- but in recent decades the ship was pulled from the bottom of the sea, and has become a priceless historic artifact. Go to http://lectricebikes.com and use code SHIPHITSTHEFAN to get a free foldable, mountable bike lock with any bike purchase. Follow us on social: https://twitter.com/mc_lotta https://twitter.com/handsomemaster2 https://twitter.com/briangaar Are you a FIRST Member and need your Private RSS feed for this show? Go here: bit.ly/FIRSTRSS

Covid has sidelined us this week, so instead of talking, we've remastered and combined our 2012 coverage of all the wives of Henry VIII into this one supersized episode. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, and Katherine Parr together! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Born in 1521, Anne Askew was condemned as a heretic for her radical Protestantism beliefs during the reign of Henry VIII. Tortured and executed after the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1537, she was also one of the earliest known women poets to compose in the English language. Uniquely, her surviving first-person account of her ordeal and her beliefs led her to being proclaimed as a Protestant martyr. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Professor Jennifer Richards, to explore Anne Askew's life and literary legacy.For this episode, the Senior Producer was Elena Guthrie, the Editor and Producer was Rob Weinberg. Anne Askew's words are read by Sarah Percival.For more Not Just The Tudors content, subscribe to our Tudor Tuesday newsletter here >If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android > or Apple store > See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Doomed queen of Henry VIII, mother to Elizabeth I, the epic story of Anne Boleyn.Anne Boleyn was the most controversial and scandalous woman ever to sit on the throne of England. From her early days at the imposing Hever Castle in Kent, to the glittering courts of Paris and London, Anne caused a stir wherever she went. Alluring but not beautiful, Anne's wit and poise won her numerous admirers at the English court, and caught the roving eye of King Henry. Anne was determined to shape her own destiny, first through a secret engagement to Henry Percy, the heir of the Earl of Northumberland, and later through her insistence on marriage with the king, after a long and tempestuous relationship as his mistress. Their love affair was as extreme as it was deadly, from Henry's 'mine own sweetheart' to 'cursed and poisoning whore' her fall from grace was total.ABOUT THE AUTHORElizabeth Norton gained her first degree from the Universiy of Cambridge, and her Masters from the University of Oxford. Her other books include Jane Seymour: Henry VIII's True Love, Anne of Cleves: Henry VIII's Discarded Bride (both published by Amberley Publishing) and She Wolves: The Notorious Queens of England. She lives in Kingston Upon Thames.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/houseofmysteryradio. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/houseofmysteryradio.

Did Henry break with Rome in order to seize power over the wealthy, ubiquitous church in England? We find that the dates don't add up. Instead we look at why in June 1525 Henry promoted his illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy over the head of his heir Mary. And why Charles V broke off his engagement with 9 year old Mary to marry a Portuguese princess instead.

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, MD of Rubber Cheese.Download our free ebook The Ultimate Guide to Doubling Your Visitor NumbersIf you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcastCompetition ends October 1st 2022. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references: https://www.hrp.org.uk/https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-londonhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/cate-milton-585a8613/https://superbloom.hrp.org.uk/content/ticket-options Transcriptions: Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. Each episode, I speak with industry experts from the attractions world.In today's episode, I speak with Cate Milton, Customer Experience Programme Officer at Historic Royal Palaces. Cate shares her infectious passion for customer experience and talks us through the six-month customer journey mapping exercise they carried out with KPMG. If you like what you hear, subscribe on all the user channels by searching Skip the Queue.Kelly Molson: Cate, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I'm really excited to speak to you.Cate Milton: Thank you so much. I'm really just as excited to speak about anything that's customer experience. So I'm excited.Kelly Molson: It's going to be a good chat, then. But first of all, I have to ask you some icebreaker questions, so we don't get to chat about customer experience quite yet. I'm going to ask you what your favourite breakfast food is.Cate Milton: Oh my God, that's a curve ball. I don't really do breakfast.Kelly Molson: Oh.Cate Milton: I get up in the morning and I feel it's way too early for my stomach to be dealing with anything like food, so I think if I'm being good, then it's usually a yogurt or some raisins. That makes me sound a lot healthier than I am.Kelly Molson: My goodness, doesn't it?Cate Milton: I mean, today it was a blueberry muffin, so it pretty much depends what's nearby. Yesterday, it was Cheeselets. So yeah, I hope my mum doesn't listen. Her main fear of me is that I'm not eating properly, and I just proved her correct there on breakfast.Kelly Molson: Oh yeah, well, listen to this though. Although, I would say that Cheeselets are an extremely tasty breakfast, so why not?Cate Milton: Honestly, I'm addicted, and now they're coming out in the picnic boxes and every time this year my entire family's like, "Find them. Stock up." Find them for me. But yeah, it's maybe not the most nutritious start to the day, but there we go.Kelly Molson: All right. Cheeselets or yogurt and raisins.Cate Milton: Yeah, not all together. Not all together, just-Kelly Molson: A balanced breakfast. Okay. What show on Netflix did you binge-watch embarrassingly fast? Cate Milton: Oh, that's a good question. So, my absolute favourite one... I got obsessed with it during lockdown like everybody else did when there was nothing else to do... was Mindhunter. So, it's kind of about the beginning of the FBI. So, anything with that kind of psychological twist. I mean, I am the cliche millennial in the true crime and I'm there like, "Oh, what's wrong with all these people?" But, Mindhunter was so good. I think they only did a couple of series and they keep kind of promising maybe a third, but nothing yet. But yeah, I did that in about two or three days... But there was nothing else to do. Everyone go watch it. Maybe if everyone watches it, then maybe they will make a third series. But yeah, the beginning of the FBI and all that kind of profiling and where all that came from.Kelly Molson: This is on my list, because I like a little true crime-Cate Milton: Oh, amazing.Kelly Molson: ... series as well. So that is on our list to watch, so I'm really glad that you recommended that, because I wasn't quite sure.Cate Milton: So good. And Jonathan Groff is in it, because he also plays the King in Hamilton. So it's really strange seeing him do this. I think he's known for musical theatre a bit more, and then in this kind of really straight role about kind of creating that psychological profiling of kind of the worst that humanity has to offer, yeah, he's amazing. But yes, watch it, put it to the top of your list. Definitely.Kelly Molson: I will do that. Third and final icebreaker question: if money and time were no object, what would you be doing right now?Cate Milton: Traveling, 100%. But that's misleading. I'm not ever going to pretend I'm the kind of traveler with a rucksack. I need something on wheels, so I would be going places with the suitcases, not having to worry about what the cheapest airport transfer is, how to get places. I would be having a lovely time. I'd never see winter again, definitely. I'm not a winter person. I'm loving the sun. So yeah, from a very selfish point of view, rather than trying to fix the rest of the world, I would be just following the sun all year round, having a lovely time.Kelly Molson: That's fine. It's your money, it's your time, you do whatever you want with it.Cate Milton: I would also donate to charity and save the whales.Kelly Molson: Saved it. Now that was a classic millennial answer.Cate Milton: Okay, yeah.Kelly Molson: All right, Cate, what is your unpopular opinion? What have you got for us?Cate Milton: I feel like this is quite unpopular. I'm also a little bit worried that if I say it that anyone listening straight away going to be like, "Well, she has no idea what she's talking about, so I'm not going to listen to the rest of this."Kelly Molson: Don't worry. Honestly, there's been some real shockers on here. You'll be good.Cate Milton: So, my unpopular opinion is that I think that tea, coffee, and alcohol are the most disgusting things on the planet. I do not understand how so much of this country is powered by one of those three things. I can't stand the taste of any of them, so I have lived my life without any of them. Maybe it's more I've got the taste palette of a child, although there's also a possibility I'm a super taster, so I'm just very sensitive and that's probably a superpower. So actually, it's all you guys that are wrong. I've just evolved out of the universe.Kelly Molson: I love this, but this is how you look so fresh-faced as well, because you don't drink the coffee-Cate Milton: Well, I don't know.Kelly Molson: ... and you don't drink the alcohol. So we are in the wrong.Cate Milton: It helps more in the money point of view, I'm not going to lie. That definitely makes a night out cheaper, but no, any fresh-facedness is down to my very complex skincare regime that I developed over the lockdown, so that's where all the money goes instead.Kelly Molson: Okay. Not enough care days. Right, listeners, tell us how you feel about Cate's unpopular opinion. Yeah, it's an interesting one. My husband's actually teetotal at the moment. He's just gone off the alcohol. Just doesn't like the effects that it leaves him with. It really affects his mood. So yeah, he's just cut it out and it's quite liberating really, isn't it?Cate Milton: Honestly, too, I've had it all the way through, so it made uni quite difficult because as soon as anyone will meet you the first question you're having to answer is, "Why don't you drink?" But definitely in the last kind of five years or so it's not a question I get so much anymore. It's just say, "Oh, okay then." So, I think there is a general trend in people... for whatever reason. There's a whole range of reasons, like trying not to drink for a little while or deciding they don't want that in their lives anymore. It's a lot more common. So, I don't have to answer that question so often because the next bit was always, "It's okay. I've got something that you'll love."Kelly Molson: But it shouldn't be a question, should it? It's just, "I don't drink." Okay.Cate Milton: How it is. I can just about manage the super sweet, if it's really sweet. So just a lot of sugar, then I can just about nurse one cocktail for about... But it will take me six hours or so to drink it. It's not something that I enjoy and it goes down nice and smooth. So yeah, unless somebody's bought it for me because they're being nice, it's not something that I partake in most of the time.Kelly Molson: Then there's the guilt of having to drink it, I guess.Cate Milton: Yeah, exactly. I'm just there sipping like, "Yeah, no, I don't need another one. This is really nice. Thank you."Kelly Molson: Okay. Right, tell us how you feel. I don't think that's too unpopular at all, Cate. Cate, you are the Customer Experience Programme Officer at Historic Royal Palaces.Cate Milton: Yes.Kelly Molson: I want to know about this role. Tell us what it involves because I'm guessing very broad.Cate Milton: Yes, you could say that. So, yeah. So I work for Historical Palaces. I actually work across all six sites. So, I'm based at the Tower. The Tower is my home and I've got the most experience in the Tower, because I originally started in Heritage, in Operations at the Tower of London. But now yeah, I work across the Tower, Kensington Palace, Hampton Court, Banqueting House, Kew Palace, and as well as Hillsborough Castle over in Northern Ireland. So yeah, I'm kind of there looking across customer experience and initiatives across those sites, trying to make sure that we've kind of got that one standard for HRP and what customer experience means, customer service means from an HRP point of view.Cate Milton: So yeah, it is quite broad. It's anything from kind of creating our customer service standard that I did with colleagues in Operations, goodness, two years ago now, I think, just before we reopened from the first lockdown, right up to more strategic things about where we need to aim for, where we need to focus our attention, having a look at a lot of customer journeys and understanding the end-to-end journey for all our sites.Cate Milton: I am the only one in my department. I am a department all by myself, so there's a lot of advocating for what customer journeys mean and joining up bits of the organisation. Not entirely by myself: I have the support of my visitor experience group, which is our operations directors, our public engagement, director and our commercial director, and all the op scenes across the site, too. I think in Operations you know how complex the journey is, you see the whole thing. So I think they're the teams I work most closely with; as well as overseeing things that are related to visitor feedback.Cate Milton: So, there's so much data. We have so much information on our visitors and what they think, what they feel, what their expectations are. So there's a little kind of work with our customer insight manager about how we best collate that, use it, spot the trends. So yeah, and also I just get deployed, really, to any kind projects that might need... Yeah, I suppose a little focus on customer experience, and I pipe up with annoying things like, "That's not customer journey-"Kelly Molson: Not thought about this.Cate Milton: "... So can we not do that." Yeah. I'm so lucky I get to get involved in basically anything that needs that kind of customer focus, which, in a visitor attraction, is nearly everything. So, it's an amazing role and, yeah, in a great place.Kelly Molson: What a job. What a job.Cate Milton: I landed on my finger this one. It's not too bad.Kelly Molson: Well, I mean, firstly: they are not terrible places to go to work every day, are they? I mean, what a place.Cate Milton: It ruins you for life though, because if anyone says to me now that you have to go to work in an old office block, it's very much, "Yeah, so where's the armed guard outside the office door? How many draw bridges do I have to go over? How many portcullises are there to go under? None? Okay, no. Well that's boring, isn't it?"Kelly Molson: It's not for me, then.Cate Milton: Exactly. Like it's, I say, "I'm sorry. I'm a palace-only person these days." But no, honestly, it's absolutely stunning. And actually, the previous governor who worked here, who kind of gave my first chance at the tower... So he's been very much a mentor to me, but I always remember him saying that, "If you ever come to work one day and you're not just awed by where you are, then it's time to leave and let somebody else come in, because you should just never forget the sites you're working at and the kind of connection to history that they've got." Yeah, I still, I still get the kind of, "Oh my God, the White Tower." It's still absolutely... I've been here coming here on and off eight years, with different roles and everything, and I still don't get over it.Kelly Molson: That's amazing. So you still get the goosebumps, you still get the-Cate Milton: Oh, completely, completely. You just walk under an archway and there are little faces carved into the arch, and they've seen every monarch since Henry III. Every single monarch we've had, like some of the biggest events in world history, have happened within these walls or at Hampton Court with Henry VIII, or Banqueting House. Charles the First was executed outside Banqueting House. So, some real key history where it happened moments have happened at our sites, and it's amazing that we get to kind of invite people in to share those stories.Kelly Molson: Well, how did you get... because you said that this, you've really landed on your feet. This is a dream role.Cate Milton: Yeah.Kelly Molson: What did you study beforehand to bring into this role?Cate Milton: So, I started... uni-wise, I did English and history degree, and then, because I graduated in the last recession, so I ended up working in schools in Essex and as a PA, and at the time, honestly, that's all I wanted to be. I was just like, I'm happy being a PA. I like organising things." It's a brilliant job if you like organising you, just sitting there really understanding nuts and bolts of things. And then I saw the PA job advertised for the governor of the Tower of London, and the Tower has been, honestly, my favourite place in the world since I was about five or six. I have a picture my grandmother took of me at the gates, kind of just like, "Let me in, let me in."Cate Milton: So getting it was a complete, complete dream come true, but I got it based on the fact I just sat there and said, "Yeah, I just want to be a PA. That's my dream. I just want to be a PA. I've got no other aspirations." But within nine months I had made the most of an opportunity to move into Ops, and then from then on I was just like, "This is what I should do. I love making stuff happen, I love working here, I love heritage. This fits who I am. This is what I want to do." So, I was there for a little bit. I was lucky enough to run an event called The Constable's Installation.Cate Milton: So, every four or five years, the Queen nominates her representative at The Tower of London, which is known as the Constable of the Tower. We've had one since 1078, so it's not a position that many people have had. And we had this big ceremony that the Lord Chamberlain comes to to install the Constable, and I was fortunate enough to be the first woman and the first civilian to run that installation in 2016.Kelly Molson: Gosh.Cate Milton: And I mean, it's still one of the best days of my life, but I peaked really, really early. I peaked at 28. That's it now, it's all downhill for now on. But doing that mix of operations and big ceremonies and events, I was kind of pinched by English Heritage to be their event manager for a couple of years, actually working with Lucy Hutchings, who I've then been working with at Hampton Court-Kelly Molson: Oh, lovely.Cate Milton: That's been really nice. Yeah. And then, I kept an eye on what was happening at HRP, because it was very much like... English Heritage is an absolutely fantastic organisation, but I'm very London-centric, so yeah, when this role came up I had the right combination of, "I've been in Ops, I've been on the front line. I understand, I care about what that experience looks like." So yeah, I applied for the role and the mothership called me home and I came back to the Tower.Kelly Molson: Oh, goodness. That's so amazing.Cate Milton: Yeah. So, I've had a lovely time the last eight years. I've been very lucky.Kelly Molson: Yeah.Cate Milton: I've been here for the last four, and it's been such a learning curve, because we originally started with a programme called [inaudible 00:14:47] and Distinctive, which is around customer experience and that's now become a little bit more kind of business as usual. But I've learnt so, so much in the last four years and really cemented that customer experiences is the bit I love the most, that I really want to do.Kelly Molson: Oh. You've left the PA dreams. You've left them behind.Cate Milton: I know. Yeah, they've fallen by the wayside a little bit and then now it's just like, I want to run things.Kelly Molson: Bigger dreams. Cate Milton: Exactly.Kelly Molson: Bigger dreams.Cate Milton: Absolutely.Kelly Molson: There's a lot... I've got so many questions for you based on what you just talked through, but we spoke a couple of weeks ago and you talked to me about the customer journey mapping exercise that you went on with KPMG, and I was really interested in this because it is really... It's similar to what we do in digital. So, we look at user journeys and we plot out where people are going to go on the site and what journeys we want to take them on, and it sounds very similar, but obviously it's in the real world. And I wanted to get you to talk that through. Tell us how you go about that. What was the need for it, to start with?Cate Milton: Yeah. So, customer journey mapping is such a vital tool for understanding the entire end-to-end journey for your customers. For example, at HRP sites we had departments who are kind of looking after individual touchpoints of our customer journey, particularly on site. But, in order to make the journey as seamless as possible and to be the best possible experience, it's essential that all of those touchpoints link together beautifully and they don't kind of jar that one department wants to do things this way and another does it this way, and... It just gets a bit jarring to go through that journey.Cate Milton: So, the customer experience overall suffers a little bit. But when you're looking at customer journey map, it really gives you that picture of this is where our customer starts, and this is the kind of thing that they're feeling, these are emotions, this is what their expectations are, and then takes you through every single touchpoint, right until the end, which is in, our case, they've gone offsite. What kind of post-visit relationship do we have with them after that?Cate Milton: So, for us it was very much the ambition to visualise that, to map that out, to get a, I suppose like a Bible of customer experience where everything is in that one place, so we can all be working to the same document, we can all understand the same thing, have the same vision, and really start kind of picking out those areas that we could focus on to improve what is... don't get me wrong... already an excellent visitor experience. We are some of the most amazing sites, some of the most amazing front-of-house teams. So it's going from good to great, rather than, "Oh my God, this is horrendous. We need to fix this."Cate Milton: So it's just where those little areas are that we could push ourselves kind of up a little bit more. So yeah, we got the help of KPMG to do that, because it was, it was not an approach that HRP had had done previously, so we needed that kind of outside consultancy, advice on how to go about that. And yeah, we worked with them on the processing of gathering all the information, the data and insight that we had, which was a mammoth task. We have a lot. We have all sorts of kind of surveys that are done about different exhibitions, or exit surveys. We have the ALVA benchmarking. There's so much information that we have just dotted around at different places, so trying to bring that all together to understand the picture that our visitors have been telling us, the information is there: what they want to see, what their expectations are, motivations, what they need on site. So, it's all that information.Cate Milton: We also ran workshops and did service safari. So, that is essentially taking a cross-palace team and kind of giving them a role for the day, giving them a persona. So, for example, you're the Walker family today. So, get your mind... We did some empathy mapping to really get people's minds into, "I'm a family. I've got a young child and a slightly old child, what do I need? Have I got buggy? Have I got to take things, am I going to need changing rooms?" All those kind of considerations. So, we gave people different personas so they could really kind of connect with some of our general groups of visitors. This is one of the frustrations, because you can't cover everybody. You do have to be very general, and there are going to be gaps in that, but some of that you can kind of cover off later. But yes, we did these service safaris and got our teams to do a visit, and to start looking at things from a visitor's point of view.Kelly Molson: That's so interesting. So, it is your own internal team that you take through this process?Cate Milton: Exactly, exactly. And it was always important to make sure that we had other members of staff who aren't used to that particular site. So, with KPMG we did Kensington and Tower of London, and it's one of those things with the best one in the world: you get blindness with your own site, because you see things day after day, you know what you're trying to focus on, what you're trying to improve, but sometimes you just stop seeing some of the things; stop seeing through the trees kind of thing. So, it's really helpful to get those other members of staff that aren't there every single day, and it's fascinating what comes out, and it's so useful for members of staff to really see like, "Oh yeah, why are we expecting us to do that?" Or, "That's actually quite difficult. Why are we doing it like that?"Cate Milton: It's so useful, and honestly, I mean, even if it's not a process, the customer data mapping is not a process that other organisations want to go through, I completely recommend doing service safaris. It really opens people's eyes. But we also had a lot of kind of one-to-one conversations with members of staff from across the organisation, and one of the most important groups in that was front of house. Visitor feedback is essential in understanding what our visitors want, and their opinions on stuff, but a lot of stuff that we got, for example, in our CRM, where visitors have contacted our contact centre, that's either the stuff that they absolutely love and is amazing or the stuff that's really upset them.Cate Milton: There's a massive gap in the middle there that our front of house team see every day in terms of minor irritations. It puts friction in, but it's not enough for someone to complain about. We need to look at that stuff as well. That's the everyday stuff that just jars with you a little bit. You just think, "Oh, that was a bit rubbish." And that stays in you. It might not be that's something you want to complain about later on, but it's still that you're going to go to friends and sort of say, "Yeah, it was good. I mean, this bit was a bit annoying."Cate Milton: So, it's so important to engage front of house teams to kind of have spies on the ground, to know what they're always asked about, to know the visitors always go the wrong way in this bit. Is it clear what room they're in? Is it clear where the toilets are, if the map's okay? So, we did quite a bit of work about talking to those guys, as well. And it's just kin of collating all of this data that everybody's got. It's just a matter of putting it together and, yeah, putting it into this, this tool that shows you what's happening at at each touchpoint. The most valuable thing, I think, the snapshot that comes from it, is the emotional journey of the customer.Cate Milton: So, obviously what you want in an ideal world is that they come in feeling okay and they leave thinking, "This is the most amazing thing. That was great. I loved every connection I had with that organisation." And that's what you're aspiring to, as well as everything nice and green and happy in the middle. But, that emotional journey graph really gives you a snapshot of, "Oh, okay. Well, things are dropping a little bit here. What going wrong here, or what can we improve here, or how has something earlier on not set this up properly? And if we fix this, is this going to effect later on?" So, it's such a valuable tool to really get that idea of what our visitors, what our customers are actually going through.Kelly Molson: That's epic though, isn't it? I mean, the amount of information that you need to have for that, and to do it really well, too. How long does a process like that take?Cate Milton: So, in terms of the data we already had, obviously we were talking kind of years of data. Customer journey mapping, you could either do it as a snapshot of the current state, or you can be a bit more aspirational and do it as a snapshot of kind of where you want to get to. It's most useful, really, to kind of have a combination of... to have two. But yeah, for us it was doing an in-depth audit of all the bits of information we had, making sure that KPMG had access to that, and we went through it with them about what this means, what this doesn't. There's also that kind of complication of, well, something exceptional happening three years ago. That means that's skewed that data a little bit.Kelly Molson: Right.Cate Milton: So what can we look into that is the kind of justification. So, for example, if our ticketing system had a blip and we get loads of complaints about that, we know that, we've solved that, and we don't need to worry too much about that, but we maybe need to record it's annoying if the ticking system has a moment. But overall, I mean, it took us maybe about six months to do with KPMG and kind of getting through all these stages of looking at the visitor staff, looking at the employee staff, looking at which departments feed into which parts, and also just identifying all the touch points. I think we've ended up with something around 70 to 80 individual touchpoints from start to finish on an onsite journey.Cate Milton: So that's only what we're talking about when visitors actually come online on site. We also have, like you were saying earlier, digital journeys that our digital engagement team look at. We have membership, we have schools, we have people with accessibility requirements. They all have a different journey.Cate Milton: There's all sorts of different things to layer on top of that you can kind of factor in. But, it was, it was very in depth and just absolutely fascinating, and a really good opportunity to kin of get everyone on board the same thing as well, and to get departments that kind of sit alongside each other, but maybe don't overlap so often. Or, we're the same as many other organisations, multi-site organisations that sometimes silos or kind of barrier, and doing things like this really starts to show everyone how they're part of the entire, and that cross-department working is really, really useful.Kelly Molson: Yeah, it's re-engaging the internal team with the visitor as well, isn't it, because you've put them in their in their shoes-Cate Milton: Absolutely.Kelly Molson: ... and you've mentioned empathy. What was it you called it?Cate Milton: Yeah. So, we did some empathy mapping, where essentially we kind of, before we sent people out on that service safari we gave them these personas and we gave them kind of questionnaires about, "What do you think this person or this group of people is looking for? What do you think their main considerations are? What do you think their main worries are? What do they need on site? What they trying to get out of it?" I mean, KPMG made us, created us some personas that combined things like our cultural segments, as well and making sure we've got that overlap between motivations and needs. Personas are a key part of customer journey mapping, and yeah, kin of creating... Say it's the general kind of average visitor, which is incredibly difficult for a lot of sites, because we've got-Kelly Molson: They don't exist, do they?Cate Milton: Exactly. Do you know what I mean? We've got people from all over the world or different backgrounds, so that is a difficult thing. But, I think one of the other things to kind of bear in mind with customer journey mapping is you don't want to get analysis paralysis. I suppose you don't want to kind of get into that mindset where you are kind of analyzing so much that you don't just get something done. It is so important to get started because the thing with customer journey maps is they're not static documents. That's not it. You don't create one and then, "Oh, we're done now. This is what it looks like."Cate Milton: You take it, you learn from it, you update it, you review it, you take kind of opportunities from it. You look at how else you can track and wonder about trends, so if you can prove something you kind of keep an eye on feedback, see it and re-improve that. So, it keeps moving. That's its value, is that it's a live document that you keep updating to see how the journey moves and where the weak points get to, and eventually you end up with just five across the board and you're like, now you're done. Now you-Kelly Molson: I'm sure that is not the case.Cate Milton: No, I don't think so.Kelly Molson: You went through this process six months. Actually, yeah, that was interesting, because I thought that you were going to say it was longer. I was expecting you to say it was a year's process.Cate Milton: Yeah.Kelly Molson: So, six months. What were the outcomes from that, and what have you had to improve because of it?Cate Milton: So, I think one of the biggest outcomes... Because I should also say that we, the delivery of this, got pushed forward slightly because the end of the world happened. So, we kind of got to spring 2020, getting to the point where we were just about to understand everything there is to know, and then obviously it just disappeared.Kelly Molson: Right? The world went, "Ah-ah-ah-ah."Cate Milton: Yeah, exactly.Kelly Molson: "Ready or not."Cate Milton: Like, "Okay then, so there's no customers to improve the experience of right now." So, that obviously put a pause on things for a little while, but one of the biggest things I think it gave a focus to, which is one of the major outcomes, was like you said, kind of helping people refocus on the visitor, on the customer. What it meant was we were able to demonstrate that operations really have ownership of that entire journey, and we have kind of... I mean, they're a bit more than subject matter experts, but like our interpretation teams, our curatorial teams, they support Ops and Ops support them to deliver.Cate Milton: But, it was just really important that we started moving towards an organisation where operations control and own that end-to-end journey, so that someone does and so that there's consistency in delivery, so that we aren't switching back and forth between different departments, which, internally we can work like that. That's fine. We understand about how it's this person interpretation and it's this person, but we don't want our visitors to feel like there's effort between touchpoints. They see it as sterile palaces, that's what we need to present it as. So, it made sense for operations to really kind of, I suppose, step up and take ownership of that, and our structure now reflects that as well.Cate Milton: So, I think in terms of kind of outcomes, it was a lot of kin of realisation of how best to run a customer experience. And also, just the fact that, like I said, we had so many different overlaps of things, and it kind of starts drawing out as well the themes throughout the entire organisation, but also there's places where the palaces, are different and there's a balance to be struck there about, they have to be different. They tell different stories, they have different personalities, but we want it to be an HRP standard, so how does that apply to each of the different sites?Cate Milton: So, after we did Tara Kensington, we've also got a ticketing journey map as well. I've just done the Hampton Court one. So, for the first time HRP has done a customer journey map by themselves, so I went out and did the Hampton Courts customer journey map, and we'd just come to the conclusion of that and fed back to the workshop group. So, kind of having that learning about how to approach these things, how to do it, how to be sustainable on our own so that we don't have to keep going back and say, "We've got another one. Can you help us do another one?" Yeah, and hopefully we'll be able to do Hillsborough and then go back and start, as I said before, layering the schools and community visits; absolutely layering accessibility.Cate Milton: A colleague of mine made the really good point that that should be a priority for us, and 100% agree. Some of our sites are incredibly challenging for people with different access requirements because they weren't built that way.Cate Milton: Tower London in particular was built to keep people out, rather than welcoming two million or so visitors. So, there's challenges around that, and I think any other historic site would sympathise with that. So, I think it just kind of focused us, really. It focused us on what we can do for customer experience, and that it's an ongoing thing. It's not a, "we'll do it, we'll fix it, we'll move on." But also just the fact that... I think I've said briefly before that it's not about fixing individual touchpoints, and the best example, I guess... I keep wheeling out this one example to everyone to demonstrate it. It's where we've kind of, as everybody has moved to a more online ticketing model... Because that's the fluid expectations of customers, that's what people expect. They want to be able to self-serve and be able to sort themselves out. Great. We're brilliant, we're on that, people can do that.Cate Milton: But the problem is that if we are moving to that model and the majority of our visitors are booking online, when they turn up onsite, if they come to the West Gate at Hampton Court, the West Gate at Tower of London, they haven't had a chat with our great admissions team, so they haven't had a chance to orientate themselves. They haven't had a chance to be given a map and be told what's going on that day. They've kind of been able to skip that and go straight to a gate. So it's kind of, okay, so we've made that bit better and more seamless, but now we've moved a problem further down the line. So, it's understanding the changes to one touch point and how that impacts the rest of the journey. You can't just fix one thing in isolation and think, "Excellent, that will be up and green now," without considering its position in the entire, in the rest of the journey I think.Kelly Molson: That is such an excellent point, isn't it? You can't fix one touch point without it impacting another.Cate Milton: Absolutely.Kelly Molson: And how do you monitor the impacts when you do?Cate Milton: Yeah.Kelly Molson: Oh, goodness. I was going to ask you what was your biggest learning from the process, but it sounds like one of the biggest learnings was being able to do it yourself.Cate Milton: Yes. I don't have to do it now. No, it absolutely was. I was so valuable to watch the the guys from KPMG, because in terms of consultancy support they are some of the best, KPMG, some of the best in that kind of area of customer experience. So, it was amazing to kind of go through that. Also kind of understand some of the psychology behind it, and what we're trying to achieve and why, and even kind of watching them watching our visitors up on Tower Hill and understanding how they're moving, and how we might be able to improve that, and where their hesitations are, and what might be going on. That kind of understanding, that psychological factor, was so useful... so, so useful for me taking it on boards and taking it further for the organisation.Kelly Molson: Do you think as a result of this, as well, that the internal teams work better... Even though this was a process to help improve the customer's experience... do you think it's actually helped the internal teams?Cate Milton: Oh, completely, 100%, because it's now something we've got to refer to and they can see where they fit in. And that's not to say that people didn't realise that before, and it's absolutely not to say that everyone was just working in their own little kingdom before, but I think it gives a central focus point.Cate Milton: And so, the end of the world got in the way the little bit, so we are looking now to kind of... Now we've got the Hampton court one and we're putting in place the process for reviewing that, for reviewing our kind of customer experience backlog documents that we now have for each palace, to understand we need to get on with this area, this element. So for example, Hampton Court, we need some better signage in the car park, so we can get on with that first. That's a priority. We know that's a, that's a pain point.Cate Milton: So, we've kind of got these lists and we're putting in place this process for reviewing those, keeping us, holding ourselves to account, making sure we're getting on with things as and when we can; the same with, basically I guess, every other kind of museum, gallery, heritage attraction resource and funding is an issue for us at the moment. So it's just understanding kind of where those priorities are. But yeah, understanding that process and how we review it, and bringing all of those departments in and kind of working together on how we fix things or improve things, I think, is definitely going to be getting better and better as we go on. We're kind of about to relaunch it, in a way, now that we've got the Hampton Court one as well.Kelly Molson: Yeah.Cate Milton: Because it's taken a while for everyone to come back to work, to find their feet again. I don't know about anyone else, but it took me a long time to be able to focus for any more than five minutes at time, so now that we're back there and it's starting to look a bit more normal. We can really start kind of launching that, making sure the entire organisation understands what we've got, why we've got them, and how we intend to use them. So, that will be kind of a job for this summer and into the autumn.Kelly Molson: I mean, what a great experience, what a great process to go through, and it's had so many incredible outcomes.Cate Milton: Yes.Kelly Molson: What would be your top tips for any organisation that's about to embark on something similar?Cate Milton: I think that the most important thing is involve your colleagues, and involve them early. A lot of people... Obviously, there's always going to be demands on kind of time and energy, but making sure that people understand early how important they are to, and how important their work in their departments are to understanding everything is vital, and organisations can only be stronger for it. I'd also say in terms of our kind of visitor attraction organisations, front of house teams, making sure that their voice is absolutely heard, because it's one thing for somebody who's in the back office, tapping away, to start coming and saying, "We think this, and we're going to fix it with this," if you haven't actually asked the guys who are out on the grounds, answering the question of where the toilets are for the 50th time in hour.Cate Milton: So, I think that was the biggest thing for me, was making sure to whatever extent that you do customer daily mapping... because you can do a pretty informal version. You can take it to the extent that we did, but it's make sure that your front of house teams are heard and are a big part of it, I think.Kelly Molson: Good tip. Weirdly, that's where we go and start, as well, from digital perspective-Cate Milton: Oh, really?Kelly Molson: ... because people often think that you just talk to the marketing department because that's who you are engaged with, that's who's brought you on. But for us to understand where digital can support the organisation, we need to understand what challenges front of house are having, and then bring the two together?Cate Milton: Completely that.Kelly Molson: Completely. So glad. I knew we'd be aligned, Cate. I knew you would be. Right. We need to talk about Superbloom.Cate Milton: Yeah.Kelly Molson: I mean, spectacular. You're in the midst of it right now. For anyone who's watching this, or anyone who's listening to this and not watching the video... Why aren't you watching the video, because we are fabulous. Cate's in a high-vis jacket right now because she's actually on site-Cate Milton: Yep.Kelly Molson: ... in the midst of Superbloom.Cate Milton: Absolutely, yes. I'm out there as an event coordinator today. So, yeah, running around looking after our volunteers and our visitors, making sure that everything's running smoothly and, yeah, everyone's happy, which is a lot easier in beautiful sunshine like this.Kelly Molson: It is a glorious, glorious day, and it is an absolutely spectacular show piece, what you have there, so congrats on pulling it off.Cate Milton: Thank you so much. I mean, I can't take really any credit for it. Honestly, it's our interpretation teams have been working on this for about three years. It's been a really long buildup to the project. The work started onsite in about October, and then there's been a lot of, kind of, since I think late March, early April, a lot of kind of staring at soil, kind of like, "Are we okay? Are they coming?"Kelly Molson: "Please work."Cate Milton: And the thing is... I mean, honestly, I can't even explain what an amazing job they've done, and there's something like 20 million seeds planted in that moat, so that the scale of it cannot be underestimated.Kelly Molson: Gosh.Cate Milton: But yeah, we got there, we opened officially on the 1st of June just in time for the Jubilee weekend, and it was something that we learned from our commemorations of World War I's, for both the poppies and the flames: that the public really liked having the Towers as kind of a place, essential place to come and take part in national events. So, that's kind of where the thought came from about celebrating the Queen's Jubilee, with that kind of changing the moat again. We've upgraded from ceramic poppies to the real thing. There's a wonderful scattering of California poppies down there at the moment, so it's looking absolutely stunning. We've got everything from different smells going on, there's music down there, which honestly is so Zen. It's my favourite place to be. I'll just go walk through like, "I'm so calm right now. There is no City of London out there, there's no traffic. I'm just in the bed of flowers and this amazing music."Cate Milton: But yeah, it's been going really well, and yeah, it's one of those times where you just realise how strong your teams are. We've got kind of event coordinators who all have other jobs, that volunteered to come out and help on their days off or alongside their regular jobs. We've got volunteer coordinators who are mostly our front of house teams, who, as anyone will know, in a summer it's so busy onsite anyway, and then for them to offer to come and help in Superbloom on days off is incredible. So, it does... Yeah, without being too kind of gooey about it, it makes you really proud to be part of an organisation that kind of has the vision to do this and then moves forward and actually does it. And we also have a slide, which is-Kelly Molson: Oh, well, I mean, if you weren't sold before Cate mentioned the slide, I mean, tick. I'm there.Cate Milton: Come and slide into the moat. Do you know what, it's the most joyous thing. The kids love it, obviously, but my absolute favourite thing has been watching adults. We have grandmothers going off and going down, and it just... I want to be like them. I want to still have that kind of, I think, playfulness, but I'm kind of closer, a little bit closer, to the end of my run on this earth, but-Kelly Molson: Oh, phenomenal, yeah.Cate Milton: Absolutely. Yeah. It's a great event, and it's just something completely different in the city, and it represents the biggest change we've made to the moat... or, not HRP, but has been made to the moat since the Duke of Wellington drained it in eight, I think 1843.Kelly Molson: Okay.Cate Milton: So, since then it's been mostly turf. It's been kind of used for other practicalities, like allotments in World War II and so on, but yeah, it hasn't been changed to this extent since then, so it's a big mark in the history of the Tower, as well; as well as kind of acknowledging the Queen's achievement, and just helping the biodiversity a little bit of city of London, as well.Kelly Molson: Yeah.Cate Milton: One of the best bits is you are walking through the flowers, if you stop and look, they're moving. There's so many pollinators and wildlife in there. It's just, yeah. It's amazing. It's a very kind of wholesome, grounding, life isn't so bad kind of place to be.Kelly Molson: Yeah. I mean, Cate, you've absolutely sold it. Absolutely.Cate Milton: Oh good, everybody come.Kelly Molson: Everyone go visit. I mean, how could you not after that? Cate, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to talk to you. We always ask our guests to recommend a book, a book that you love, that you'd recommend to our listeners. What have you got for us?Cate Milton: So, this was so hard, honestly. I was sat there looking at my bookshelves because I've got everything from basically every book that's ever been written on Henry V, because I'm a geek on that side of things. I think one of the ones that kind of really woke me up to understanding the psychological side of customer experience a little bit more was Thinking Fast and Slow, which most people in this environment, I'm sure, have read or heard of. But, it's a great way of understanding what's going on in people's minds when they're just going around their everyday life. So yeah, that's been so helpful in terms of working out how to make things more seamless and making sure that people can do things automatically, and it's intuitive and obvious, which means the bigger part of them is free to enjoy and be happy and be excited about where they are.Cate Milton: So, I think that's definitely a big one for me. But, from a kind of personal side of view, if I'm not looking at heritage, then whales and dolphins are my absolute, absolute passion, and there's a book, called Leviathan, by Philip Hoare, who's... He's also a whale fanatic, and it's just his relationship with understanding the oceans, understanding kind of the history of whales, of whaling, the changing relationship between humanity and whales. It's my absolute favourite book. So yeah, if you want something a bit out there, a bit random, then Leviathan is an amazingly well-written book.Kelly Molson: That sounds beautiful. Well, I mean, neither of those books have been recommended on the podcast before. This is really interesting.Cate Milton: It's like, Thinking Fast and Slow, I was just like, I feel like everyone would've said that one because it's, yeah. The chapters are really short. It's kind of a concentrating read, but absolutely, it really sets out how humans think and why we are as we are, so I think it's really, really valuable in terms of thinking about customer experience.Kelly Molson: Yes, great. I'm absolutely amazed that nobody has recommended it before, but, right. Okay. So we... Well, Cate has blown my marketing budget, like most people do. So, we'll give you two books to win this month.Cate Milton: Thank you, thank you. Sorry about that.Kelly Molson: You know what to do, listeners: head over to our Twitter account, find this episode announcement, and retweet it with the words, "I want Cate's book..." Uh, books because there's two.Cate Milton: Yeah, sorry. Sorry.Kelly Molson: And you'll be in with a chance of winning them. So, go over and do that. Cate, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you.Cate Milton: Thank you so much. I honestly, I'm such a geek on this stuff, so it's so nice to have an excuse to talk about it.Kelly Molson: I've loved it. Well, feel free to come back on any time and talk more about it, because it's been a delight.Cate Milton: Thank you so much.Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five-star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.  

"Thomas More stuck his neck out"

What you'll learn in this episode: Why the best modernist pieces are fetching record prices at auction today How “Messengers of Modernism” helped legitimize modernist jewelry as an art form The difference between modern jewelry and modernist jewelry Who the most influential modernist jewelers were and where they drew their inspiration from Why modernist jewelry was a source of empowerment for women About Toni Greenbaum Toni Greenbaum is a New York-based art historian specializing in twentieth and twenty-first century jewelry and metalwork. She wrote Messengers of Modernism: American Studio Jewelry 1940-1960 (Montréal: Musée des Arts Décoratifs and Flammarion, 1996), Sam Kramer: Jeweler on the Edge (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2019) and “Jewelers in Wonderland,” an essay on Sam Kramer and Karl Fritsch for Jewelry Stories: Highlights from the Collection 1947-2019 (New York: Museum of Arts and Design and Arnoldsche, 2021), along with numerous book chapters, exhibition catalogues, and essays for arts publications. Greenbaum has lectured internationally at institutions such as the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Savannah. She has worked on exhibitions for several museums, including the Victoria and Albert in London, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, and Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York. Additional Resources: Link to Purchase Books Toni's Instagram The Jewelry Library  Photos Available on TheJewelryJourney.com Transcript: Once misunderstood as an illegitimate art form, modernist jewelry has come into its own, now fetching five and six-figure prices at auction. Modernist jewelry likely wouldn't have come this far without the work of Toni Greenbaum, an art historian, professor and author of “Messengers of Modernism: American Studio Jewelry, 1940 to 1960.” She joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about the history of modernist jewelry; why it sets the women who wear it apart; and where collectors should start if they want to add modernist pieces to their collections. Read the episode transcript here.   Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is a two-part Jewelry Journey Podcast. Please make sure you subscribe so you can hear part two as soon as it comes out later this week.    Today my guest is art historian, professor and author Toni Greenbaum. She is the author of the iconic tome, “Messengers of Modernism: American Studio Jewelry, 1940 to 1960,” which analyzes the output of America's modernist jewelers. Most recently, she authored “Sam Kramer: Jeweler on the Edge,” a biography of the jeweler Sam Kramer. Every time I say jeweler I think I'm using the world a little loosely, but we're so glad to have you here today. Thank you so much.   Toni: I am so glad to be here, Sharon. Thank you so much for inviting me. It's been many years coming.   Sharon: I'm glad we connected. Tell me about your jewelry journey. It sounds very interesting.   Toni: Well, there's a lot you don't know about my jewelry journey. My jewelry journey began when I was a preteen. I just became fascinated with Native American, particularly Navajo, jewelry that I would see in museum gift shops. I started to buy it when I was a teenager, what I could afford. In those days, I have to say museum gift shops were fabulous, particularly the Museum of Natural History gift shop, the Brooklyn Museum gift shop. They had a lot of ethnographic material of very high quality. So, I continued to buy Native American jewelry. My mother used to love handcrafted jewelry, and she would buy it in whatever craft shops or galleries she could find.    Then eventually in my 20s and 30s, I got outpriced. Native American jewelry was becoming very, very fashionable, particularly in the late 60s, 1970s. I started to see something that looked, to me, very much like Native American jewelry, but it was signed. It had names on it, and some of them sounded kind of Mexican—in fact, they were Mexican. So, I started to buy Mexican jewelry because I could afford it. Then that became very popular when names like William Spratling and Los Castillo and Hector Aguilar became known. I saw something that looked like Mexican jewelry and Navajo jewelry, but it wasn't; it was made by Americans. In fact, it would come to be known as modernist jewelry. Then I got outpriced with that, but that's the start of my jewelry journey.   Sharon: So, you liked jewelry from when you were a youth.    Toni: Oh, from when I was a child. I was one of these little three, four-year-olds that was all decked out. My mother loved jewelry. I was an only child, and I was, at that time, the only grandchild. My grandparents spoiled me, and my parents spoiled me, and I loved jewelry, so I got a lot of jewelry. That and Frankie Avalon records.   Sharon: Do you still collect modernist? You said you were getting outpriced. You write about it. Do you still collect it?   Toni: Not really. The best of the modernist jewelry is extraordinarily expensive, and unfortunately, I want the best. If I see something when my husband and I are antiquing or at a flea market or at a show that has style and that's affordable, occasionally I'll buy it, but I would not say that I can buy the kind of jewelry I want in the modernist category any longer. I did buy several pieces in the early 1980s from Fifty/50 Gallery, when they were first putting modernist jewelry on the map in the commercial aspect. I was writing about it; they were selling it. They were always and still are. Mark McDonald still is so generous with me as far as getting images and aiding my research immeasurably. Back then, the modernist jewelry was affordable, and luckily I did buy some major pieces for a tenth of what they would get today.   Sharon: Wow! When you say the best of modernist jewelry today, Calder was just astronomical. We'll put that aside.   Toni: Even more astronomical: there's a Harry Bertoia necklace that somebody called my attention to that is coming up at an auction at Christie's. If they don't put that in their jewelry auctions, they'll put it in their design auctions. I think it's coming up at the end of June; I forget the exact day. The estimate on the Harry Bertoia necklace is $200,000 to $300,000—and this is a Harry Bertoia necklace. I'm just chomping at the bit to find out what it, in fact, is going to bring, but that's the estimate they put, at $200,000 to $300,000.   Sharon: That's a lot of money. What holds your interest in modernist jewelry?   Toni: The incredible but very subtle design aspect of it. Actually, tomorrow I'm going to be giving a talk on Art Smith for GemEx. Because my background is art history, one of the things I always do when I talk about these objects is to show how they were inspired by the modern art movements. This is, I think, what sets modernist jewelry apart from other categories of modern and contemporary jewelry. There are many inspirations, but it is that they are very much inspired by Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Biomorphism, etc., depending on the artist. Some are influenced by all of the above, and I think I saw that. I saw it implicitly before I began to analyze it in the jewelry.    This jewelry is extraordinarily well-conceived. A lot of the craftsmanship is not pristine, but I have never been one for pristine craftsmanship. I love rough surfaces, and I love the process to show in the jewelry. Much of the modernist jewelry is irreverent—I use the word irreverent instead of sloppy—as far as the process is concerned. It was that hands-on, very direct approach, in addition to this wonderful design sense, which, again, came from the modern art movements. Most of the jewelers—not all of them, but most of them—lived either in New York or in Northern or Southern California and had access to museums, and these people were aesthetes. They would go to museums. They would see Miro's work; they would see Picasso's work, and they would definitely infuse their designs with that sensibility.   Sharon: Do you think that jumped out at you, the fact that they were inspired by different art movements, because you studied art history? You teach it, or you did teach it at one time?    Toni: No, just history of jewelry. I majored in art history, but I've never taught art history. I've taught history of jewelry. We can argue about whether jewelry is art or not, but history of jewelry is what I've taught.   Sharon: I've taken basic art history, but I couldn't tell you some of the movements you're talking about. I can't identify the different movements. Do you think it jumped out at you because you're knowledgeable?   Toni: Yes, definitely, because I would look at Art Smith and I would say, “That's Biomorphism.” I would see it. It was obvious. I would look at Sam Kramer and I would say, “This is Surrealism.” He was called a surrealist jeweler back in his day, when he was practicing and when he had his shop on 8th Street. I would look at Rebajes and I would see Cubism. Of course, it was because I was well-versed in those movements, because what I was always most interested in when I was studying art history were the more modern movements.   Sharon: Did you think you would segue to jewelry in general? Was that something on your radar?   Toni: That's a very interesting question because when I was in college, I had a nucleus of professors who happened to have come from Cranbrook.   Sharon: I'm sorry, from where?   Toni: Cranbrook School of Art.   Sharon: O.K., Cranbrook.   Toni: I actually took a metalsmithing class as an elective, just to see what it was because I was so interested in jewelry, although I was studying what I call legitimate art history. I was so interested in jewelry that I wanted to see what the process was. I probably was the worst jeweler that ever tried to make jewelry, but I learned what it is to make. I will tell you something else, Sharon, it is what has given me such respect for the jewelers, because when you try to do it yourself and you see how challenging it is, you really respect the people who do it miraculously even more.    So, I took this class just to see what it was, and the teacher—I still remember his name. His name was Cunningham; I don't remember his first name. He was from Cranbrook, and he sent the class to a retail store in New York on 53rd Street, right opposite MOMA, called America House.   Sharon: Called American House?   Toni: America House. America House was the retail enterprise of the American Craft Council. They had the museum, which was then called the Museum of Contemporary Crafts; now it's called MAD, Museum of Arts and Design. They had the museum, and they had a magazine, Craft Horizons, which then became American Craft, and then they had this retail store. I went into America House—and this was the late 1960s—and I knew I had found my calling. I looked at this jewelry, which was really fine studio jewelry. It was done by Ronald Pearson; it was done by Jack Kripp. These were the people that America House carried. I couldn't afford to buy it. I did buy some of the jewelry when they went out of business and had a big sale in the early 1970s. At that time I couldn't, but I looked at the jewelry and the holloware, and I had never seen anything like it. Yes, I had seen Native American that I loved, and I had seen Mexican that I loved. I hadn't yet seen modernist; that wasn't going to come until the early 1980s. But here I saw this second generation of studio jewelers, and I said, “I don't know what I'm going to do with this professionally, but I know I've got to do something with it because this is who I am. This is what I love.”    Back in the late 1960s, it was called applied arts. Anything that was not painting and sculpture was applied art. Ceramics was applied art; furniture was applied art; textiles, jewelry, any kind of metalwork was applied art. Nobody took it seriously as an academic discipline in America, here in this country. Then I went on to graduate school, still in art history. I was specializing in what was then contemporary art, particularly color field painting, but I just loved what was called the crafts, particularly the metalwork. I started to go to the library and research books on jewelry. I found books on jewelry, but they were all published in Europe, mostly England. There were things in other languages other than French, which I could read with a dictionary. There were books on jewelry history, but they were not written in America; everything was in Europe. So, I started to read voraciously about the history of jewelry, mostly the books that came out of the Victoria & Albert Museum. I read all about ancient jewelry and medieval jewelry and Renaissance jewelry. Graham Hughes, who was then the director of the V&A, had written a book, “Modern Jewelry,” and it had jewelry by artists, designed by Picasso and Max Ernst and Brach, including things that were handmade in England and all over Europe. I think even some of the early jewelers in our discipline were in that book. If I remember correctly, I think Friedrich Becker, for example, might have been in Graham Hughes' “Modern Jewelry,” because that was published, I believe, in the late 1960s.    So, I saw there was a literature in studio jewelry; it just wasn't in America. Then I found a book on William Spratling, this Mexican jeweler whose work I had collected. It was not a book about his jewelry; it was an autobiography about himself that obviously he had written, but it was so rich in talking about the metalsmithing community in Taxco, Mexico, which is where he, as an American, went to study the colonial architecture. He wound up staying and renovating the silver mines that had been dormant since the 18th century. It was such a great story, and I said, “There's something here,” but no graduate advisor at that time, in the early 70s, was going to support you in wanting to do a thesis on applied art, no matter what the medium. But in the back of my mind, I always said, “I'm going to do something with this at some point.”    Honestly, Sharon, I never thought I would live to see the day that this discipline is as rich as it is, with so much literature, with our publishers publishing all of these fantastic jewelry books, and other publishers, like Flammarion in Paris, which published “Messengers of Modernism.” Then there's the interest in Montreal at the Museum of Fine Arts, which is the museum that has the “Messengers of Modernism” collection. It has filtered into the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, obviously MAD. So many museums are welcoming. I never thought I would live to see the day. It really is so heartening. I don't have words to express how important this is, but I just started to do it. In the early 1970s or mid-1970s—I don't think my daughter was born yet. My son was a toddler. I would sit in my free moments and write an article about William Spratling, because he was American. He went to Mexico, but he was American. He was the only American I knew of that I could write about. Not that that article was published at that time, but I was doing the research and I was writing it.   Sharon: That's interesting. If there had been a discipline of jewelry history or something in the applied arts, if an advisor had said, “Yes, I'll support you,” or “Why don't you go ahead and get your doctorate or your master's,” that's something you would have done?   Toni: Totally, without even a thought, yes. Because when I was studying art history, I would look at Hans Holbein's paintings of Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More, and all I would do was look at the jewelry they were wearing, the chains and the badges on their berets. I said, “Oh my god, that is so spectacular.” Then I learned that Holbein actually designed the jewelry, which a lot of people don't know. I said, “There is something to this.” I would look at 18th century paintings with women, with their pearls and rings and bracelets, and all I would do was look at the jewelry. I would have in a heartbeat. If I could have had a graduate advisor, I would have definitely pursued that.   Sharon: When you say you never thought you'd live to see the day when modernist jewelry is so popular—not that it's so surprising, but you are one of the leaders of the movement. When I mentioned to somebody, “Oh, I like modernist jewelry,” the first thing they said was, “Well, have you read ‘Messengers of Modernism?'” As soon as I came home—I was on a trip—I got it. So, you are one of the leaders.   Toni: Well, it is interesting. It is sort of the standard text, but people will say, “Well, why isn't Claire Falkenstein in the book? She's so important,” and I say, “It's looked upon as a standard text, but the fact is it's a catalogue to an exhibition. That was the collection.” Fifty/50 Gallery had a private collection. As I said before, they were at the forefront of promoting and selling modernist jewelry, but they did have a private collection. That collection went to Montreal in the 1990s because at that time, there wasn't an American museum that was interested in taking that collection. That book is the catalogue of that finite collection. So, there are people who are major modernist jewelers—Claire Falkenstein is one that comes to mind—that are not in that collection, so they're not in the book. There's a lot more to be said and written about that movement.   Sharon: I'm sure you've been asked this a million times: What's the difference between modern and modernist jewelry?   Toni: Modern is something that's up to date at a point in time, but modernist jewelry is—this is a word we adopted. The word existed, but we adopted it to define the mid-20th century studio jewelry, the post-war jewelry. It really goes from 1940 to the 1960s. That's it; that's the time limit of modernist jewelry. Again, it's a word we appropriated. We took that word and said, “We're going to call this category modernist jewelry because we have to call it something, so that's the term.” Modern means up to date. That's just a general word.   Sharon: When you go to a show and see things that are in the modernist style, it's not truly modernist if it was done today, it wasn't done before 1960.   Toni: Right, no. Modernist jewelry is work that's done in that particular timeframe and that also subscribes to what I was saying, this appropriation of motifs from the modern art movement. There was plenty of costume jewelry and fine jewelry being done post-war, and that is jewelry that is mid-20th century. You can call it mid-20th century modern, which confuses the issue even more, but it's not modernist jewelry. Modernist jewelry is jewelry that was done in the studio by a silversmith and was inspired by the great movements in modern art and some other inspirations. Art Smith was extremely motivated by African motifs, but also by Calder and by Biomorphism. It's not religious. There are certainly gray areas, but in general, that's modernist jewelry.    Sharon: I feel envious when you talk about everything that was going in on New York. I have a passion, but there's no place on the West Coast that I would go to look at some of this stuff.   Toni: I'll tell you one of the ironies, Sharon. Post-war, definitely through the 1950s and early 1960s, there must have been 13 to 15 studio shops by modernist jewelers. You had Sam Kramer on 8th Street and Art Smith on 4th Street and Polo Bell, who was on 4th Street and then he was on 8th Street, and Bill Tendler, and you had Jules Brenner, and Henry Steig was Uptown. Ed Wiener was all over the place. There were so many jewelers in New York, and I never knew about them. I never went to any of their shops. I used to hang out in the Village when I was a young teenager, walked on 4th Street; never saw Art Smith's shop. He was there from 1949 until 1977. I used to walk on 8th Street, and Sam Kramer was on the second floor. I never looked up, and I didn't know this kind of jewelry existed. In those days, like I said, I was still collecting Navajo.

Bachelor Nation Season of los dejaos. Daly no sabía de Henry VIII

Lady Jane Grey (1537-1554): We continue today with the poignant story of England's “Nine Day Queen,” Lady Jane Grey. Although used as a political pawn by unscrupulous members of the aristocracy (including her own parents!), Jane maintained her ardent, radiant faith in Christ to the very end of her life, serving as an inspiration to the Protestant cause in England. We close this episode with another story sent in by one of our listeners, the incredible testimony of missionary Phyllis Sortor. You won't want to miss it! Five Women of the English Reformation by Paul F.M. Zahl The Children of Henry VIII by Alison Weir

Lady Jane Grey (1537-1554): One of the most tragic figures in English history is Lady Jane Grey, the “Nine Day Queen of England” whose lineage and outspoken Protestant faith put her in the crosshairs of political intrigue around the throne. Today we will talk about Lady Jane's early life and how her faith in Jesus carried her through a turbulent and difficult childhood. We know you will find this brave young girl as fascinating as we do! Five Women of the English Reformation by Paul F.M. Zahl The Children of Henry VIII by Alison Weir

David Goodhart is a British journalist. In 1995 he founded Prospect, the center-left political magazine, where he served as editor for 15 years, and then became the director of Demos, the cross-party think tank. His book The Road to Somewhere coined the terms “Anywheres” and “Somewheres” to help us understand populism in the contemporary West. We also discuss his latest book, Head Hand Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or click the dropdown menu to add the Dishcast to your podcast feed). For two clips of our convo — on why elites favor open borders, and why smart people are overvalued — head over to our YouTube page. Early in the episode, David discusses how his adolescent schooling in Marxism was “a bit like how people sometimes talk about the classics as a sort of intellectual gymnasium — learning how to argue.” Which brings to mind the following note from a listener:I feel compelled to tell you how much I enjoyed listening to your episode with Roosevelt Montás. I’m a retired lawyer in my 60s, and although I had a decent education growing up, my experience did not involve a full immersion in the classics. Hearing you two talk was like sitting in a dorm room in college — except the people talking are older, wiser, actually know what they were talking about. What a treat. I’m a pretty regular listener of the Dishcast, and this was the best yet in my opinion.Much of this week’s episode with David centers on how our capitalist society ascribes too much social and moral value to cognitive ability. That theme was also central to our episode last year with Charles Murray, who emphasizes in the following clip the “unearned gift” of high IQ:The following listener was a big fan of the episode (which we transcribed last week):I must tell you that your conversation with Charles Murray was the single best podcast I’ve ever heard. So deep, broad, and thought provoking. Thank you both for your willingness to explore “unacceptable” ideas so thoughtfully and carefully.I have read two of Charles’ books — Human Diversity and Facing Reality — and, among other things, I am stunned by how ordinary a person he seems to be. That sounds odd. What I mean to say is that, while few people could analyze and assemble so much data and present it so compellingly, his conclusions are what the average person “already knows.” I suspect that most people couldn’t plow through Human Diversity, but given a brief synopsis, they would say “duh.”When you mentioned your deep respect for black culture in America, you touched on something I wish had been more developed in Charles’ books: the option we have of celebrating human diversity rather than resigning ourselves to it or denying it. I would like to develop that idea a bit further:Conservation biologists understand (celebrate) the value of genetic diversity in nonhuman species, because each population potentially brings to the species genes that will allow it to flourish under some future environmental challenge, whether that be disease outbreak, climate change, competition from invasive species, etc. Humans too, as living organisms, have faced and will undoubtedly continue to face many unforeseen challenges, whether environmental, cultural, economic, etc. Hopefully, we will continue to rise to these challenges, but we have no way of knowing which genes from which populations will carry the critical traits that will allow us to do so. So, all the better that races DO differ and ARE diverse — in the aggregate, on average. Population differences are GOOD for a species because they confer resilience!Oh, and for the record, I tend to be center-left, with most of my friends leaning further to the left, so the ideas you presented are forbidden fruits. I cannot discuss them with anyone other than my husband, who can hardly bear to listen because they are so taboo in our circle.Here’s another clip with Charles, bringing Christianity into the mix:This next listener strongly dissents:Charles Murray, and you as well, seem to believe that you can magically separate out the effects of culture and poverty, and determine the effect of “race” on intelligence, which you define as IQ. The problem is, everything you’ve discussed here is nonsense.First, you assume that the term “race” describes a shorthand for people who share a common genetic background, and I suspect this is garbage. Most American Blacks have multi-ethnic backgrounds, with skin melanin being the main shared genetic feature. So, there’s little reason to believe that there’s a correlation between melanin content and other genetic features.Second, you assume that IQ describes general intelligence, that G factor Murray talks about. But intelligence is clearly multi-dimensional. My wife and youngest daughter have a facility with Scrabble, and general word enumeration games, that is way beyond me, and they’re better writers than I am. On the other hand, I have a general facility with mathematics that they can’t match (though my oldest daughter might be able to). And that’s just two dimensions; I’d bet there are many more, encompassing things like artistic talent, architectural design and talents in other arenas. You yourself are an excellent writer and interviewer, but I’ve read your writings for years, and I’d bet your understanding of statistics is elementary at best.Finally, you have no answer to the remarkable changes in IQ in Ashkenazi Jews over the past century. Supposedly IQ is supposed to represent an innate and unchangeable measurement of intelligence. And if you believe that average IQ of an ethnic group is a meaningful measurement, then you have to explain the changes in average IQ among American Jews over the past century. Goddard in the early 20th century claimed that 83% of tested Jews were feebleminded, while today, the great grandchildren of those feebleminded Jews now have IQs 1/2 to a full standard deviation above their co-nationalists. There’s an obvious answer here: IQ tests simply don’t test anything fundamental, but instead test how integrated into American culture the tested subjects were at the time.These are serious challenges to the idea that specific ethnic groups have unchangeable intellectual talents: some of your ethnic groups are non-homogeneous genetically, your definition of intelligence is simplistic, and there’s clear evidence that social integration greatly overwhelms any inter-group average differences. It is obvious that some people are more talented in one area than another, and that a significant amount of these differences are determined genetically. But when you move from the case of individuals to trying to correlate American racial groups with intelligence, I truly believe you’re just making a big mistake. Many Blacks in this country have grown up with the expectations that they simply can’t succeed on their own. I find it impossible to believe that we can filter out the effect of being raised with the expectation of failure. I work in tech, and it seems that a seriously disproportionate number of Blacks at my Gang of Five company come from the Caribbean — where, of course, Blacks are a majority and don’t face the same expectations of failure. We had a panel discussion on race and all the panelists came from the Caribbean, and all had stories of parental expectations that you’d expect from a stereotypical Asian-American family today.That said, right now, the Woke are acting more patronizing (and in my view, racist) than anything since the ‘60s. At this point, the Woke (I refuse to apply this label to the whole Left) treat Blacks as incredibly fragile beings who can’t handle any discussions of problems that aren’t laid at the feet of white people’s racism. It’s pretty disgusting.Instead of going point for point with my reader, here’s a comprehensive list of Dish coverage on the subject from the blog days. Another listener recommends a related guest for the Dishcast:After ruminating on some of your recent podcasts, I’d like to suggest a future guest: Paige Harden, author of The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality and professor of behavioral psychology at the University of Texas-Austin. I imagine you’ve read her profile in The New Yorker. Since your conversation with Briahna Joy Gray, the tension between matters of structure and personal agency have been echoing in my head.When I listen to other guests of yours, other podcast hosts, other conservatives, I see everywhere the tension between structure and personal agency. And having read Harden’s book this fall, I’ve been thinking of her work more and more as a bridge between these seemingly divergent world views. She swims in the same research waters as Charles Murray and Robert Plomin — but she (a) is explicitly clear that this research has, as of yet, no value in studying ethnic groups and (b) treats environmental factors differently than they do. On the latter, Harden makes some compelling arguments about the interplay between environment and expression of individuals’ genes (and thus abilities). It’s easy to see the corollaries in personal ability and responsibility (both with strong roots in genetics) versus the leftist tendency to dismiss people’s actions vis a vis blaming structural inequalities.Harden sometimes trades in some language verging on woke, for lack of a better term, but her more nuanced philosophical references are to John Rawls, not neo-Marxists. She’s really quite convincing. Also, I’ve always appreciated that you ask your guests to reflect on their upbringing and how they got where they are. Having read that New Yorker piece and her book, I think hers is an interesting story in and of itself.It is indeed. Harden is a great idea for a guest. I’ll confess that I felt I needed to read her book thoroughly to engage her, and didn’t have the time so put it off. Thanks for the reminder.A reader responds to a quote we posted last week praising Mike Pence for standing up to Trump after the assault on the Capitol:Pence had innumerable chances over years to expose Trump for exactly what he was. Besides one forceful speech since, there hasn’t been much else from the MAGA-excommunicated, nearly-executed veep. How about a live appearance before the Jan 6 Commission, Mr Vice President? Probably not. While I agree that Mike Pence may have saved the republic on Jan 6, he only did so with a gun to his head — with an actual gallows erected for him, while the Capitol was being stormed and people were dying. Better late than never, but he really cut it close, no?Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney are the profiles in courage here, along with all those Capitol police. Pence doesn’t deserve this lionization … at least not yet.Points taken. But to be honest, any mainstream Republican who opposed the attempted coup is a hero in my book. Another reader quotes me and dissents:The early Biden assurance that inflation was only a blip has become ridiculous, as Janet Yellen herself has conceded. No, Biden isn’t responsible for most of it. But some of it? Yep. A massive boost to demand when supply is crippled is dumb policy making. And imagine how worse it would be if Biden had gotten his entire package. Larry Summers was right — again.European countries did not have stimulus like we did, yet they are experiencing similar levels of inflation. This would indicate that inflation is a world-wide phenomenon and not tied to our particular stimulus packages. Also, Larry Summers has been pretty much wrong on everything — here’s a synopsis from 2013 (or just google “larry summers wrong on everything” and see the articles that pop up). Money quote:And Summers has made a lot of errors in the past 20 years, despite the eminence of his research. As a government official, he helped author a series of ultimately disastrous or wrongheaded policies, from his big deregulatory moves as a Clinton administration apparatchik to his too-tepid response to the Great Recession as Obama's chief economic adviser. Summers pushed a stimulus that was too meek, and, along with his chief ally, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, he helped to ensure that millions of desperate mortgage-holders would stay underwater by failing to support a "cramdown" that would have allowed federal bankruptcy judges to have banks reduce mortgage balances, cut interest rates, and lengthen the terms of loans. At the same time, he supported every bailout of financial firms. All of this has left the economy still in the doldrums, five years after Lehman Brothers' 2008 collapse, and hurt the middle class. Yet in no instance has Summers ever been known to publicly acknowledge a mistake.Sorry, but the EU provided a Covid stimulus of $2.2 trillion. And Summers was clearly right in this case, and Janet Yellen wrong. Another reader also pushes back on the passage I wrote above:I have a bone to pick with you when you discuss the Biden economic policy. Your contention is that the American Rescue Plan was “dumb policy making” because it exacerbated inflation. Fair enough — but if we are going to discuss the economy, then we need to have a full exploration of the policy choices and their implications. Yes, we have had six months of multi-decade high inflation, but we also have had about a year of near-record lows in unemployment and record-high job creation. Before you dismiss that as simply due to the reopening of the economy post-COVID, it’s worth noting that the American economic recovery has vastly outperformed all prognostications, as well as other Western economies. So in sum, the result of Biden’s policy is high inflation, high growth, high job creation, low unemployment. Let’s be clear then: when you criticize the ARP as too big and thus causing inflation, you are advocating for stable prices at the cost of a low growth, high unemployment environment. It’s a fair argument, I suppose. But after having lived through the weak economic recovery engineered by Larry Summers during the Obama administration, one that choked the early careers of many millennials, I’m not sure Biden’s choice was particularly egregious. But what we may well be about to get is stagflation — as interest rates go up even as inflation continues. It’s possible we fucked up both times: in 2009 with too little stimulus and in 2020 too much. I understand why those decisions were taken and the reasons were sane. But they were still wrong. Tim Noah has been doing great work lately on these questions of inflation and recession, including an interview with Summers. This next reader defends Biden’s record on the economy and beyond:The pragmatic counter-argument to your criticism of Biden is this: his economic program, while inflationary, produced unprecedented job growth after a recession, reductions by 50% in child poverty, more than five new business startups, and increases in business investment and personal bank balances of more than 20%. It’s among the reasons the American economy is outperforming China’s for the first time in two generations.Biden’s signature foreign policy achievements in Central Europe have led to the enlargement of NATO and awakened Europe to its responsibilities to its own security, all of which will contain Russia over the long term. This precedent, coupled with the Aussie-Brit nuclear deal, opens real possibilities for containing China’s potential regional expansion in Asia. At home, Biden’s Justice Department, like Gerald Ford’s, is fumigating the fetid stench of politics it inherited. The Biden White House has re-opened the doors to governors and mayors who need help from Washington in a disaster, regardless of partisan affiliation or views of Dear Leader; and it is laying the groundwork for a much-needed affordable-housing boom in our cities. Your hopes for a politics of dynamic centrism, which I share, does not take into account that as many as 10 million of our fellow citizens are prone to political violence due to the real-world influence of Great Replacement Theory, according to Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago. There is no comparable threat from the illiberalism on the left — which is a problem, nonetheless. In the wake of Trump’s loss in 2020, leading Republicans, including the governors of Florida and Texas, are competing for those constituents. That’s a movement my fellow classical liberals and I — stretching from the center-left to the center-right — can and should live without. Bill Buckley wouldn’t have sucked up to them. In the real world, the GOP wooing of the violent right poses an existential threat to our quality of life. It’s why I am voting straight Democratic in 2022. And it is why I would gladly vote for Biden, again in 2024, if he sought re-election.Happy to air your perspective. This next reader is bracing himself for Trump 2024:I know it gives you a warm feeling all over to write a column about the revolt against the woke, but it won’t be wokism that propels Republicans into office in 2022 and returns Trump to power in 2024 — something I agree will be a disaster for the republic. Trump’s return to power feels inevitable to me today. The January 6th hearings will make no difference to Trump supporters.Don’t get me wrong; I think wokism is annoying and stupid, but it is not the threat to the nation that you believe it is, and it never was. Wokism has destroyed the left and that is the real tragedy. Instead of a populist left railing against the rich, we have a bourgeois left railing against heterosexual white men, leaving the working class in the thrall of an American Orban. The working class now feels that the left and Democrats have failed them; and they are right, they have.Americans will vote for Republican for one reason: inflation. It should be no surprise that inflation is out of control, but both Biden and Trump spent billions helping people who were unable to work during Covid (the right policy) without raising taxes (the wrong policy). Now, to fight inflation we need to raise taxes and that is impossible; there aren’t the votes in the Senate. American tax policy is insane. You can have low taxes, or you can solve social problems like helping people who can’t work because of a pandemic, an inadequate public health system still unprepared for the next pandemic, homelessness and addiction, and crime. But you can’t have both. It really isn’t that complicated.Grateful as always for the counterpoints, and you can always send your own to dish@andrewsullivan.com. Another dissenter gets historical:I agree wholeheartedly with your clarion condemnation of the odious Trump. But you are wide of the historical mark when you state that Trump is “the first real tyrannical spirit to inhabit the office since Andrew Jackson.” Jackson was authoritarian in character. He was a product of the trauma of the Revolution and he brought his military identity to the White House. But he was not a tyrant or dictator. (There is more historical evidence for Lincoln as dictatorial than Jackson.) More appropriate — if non-American — comparisons for Trump would be Henry VIII, Wilhelm II, Mussolini and Nixon.Mind you, an interesting Dishcast guest would be Jon Meacham to discuss US presidents with authoritarian tendencies: Adams Sr., Polk, Andrew Johnson, Teddy R and Wilson. All expressed some form of authoritarianism, but sometimes the presidency and the nation derived benefitAnother digs deeper into the Jackson comparison:I suggest you interview W.H. Brands, who wrote a biography of Andrew Jackson. There are many ways to judge a history book, but to me an important criterion is, did I learn anything I did not already know?  Reading this book I did.I am only going to mention one of a good number events in Jackson’s life that Brands brings to the forefront. After the Battle of New Orleans, Gen. Jackson had ordered that a curfew remain in effect and that the city was to remain under martial law. For good reason: while the British offensive on one flank was a disaster, they had relative success on the other flank, and their remaining commander could have ended the truce and ordered another attack. But the British never did a follow-up attack. One New Orleans business man then took Andrew Jackson to court, claiming he endured an unnecessary economic loss on account of the military curfew. The court ruled in the businessman’s favor. AND, incredibly, Andrew Jackson paid the fine! Now stop and think, what must have been on Old Hickory’s mind. Here he risks life and limb to save the city from British domination, and he’s fined. Andrew could think, why should I pay?  I’ve got the Army in my control, I’m not just a commander whom soldiers fear, but also one that has the adulation and respect of my soldiers and the populace at large.   To me, that episode reveals that Jackson was hardly the tyrant he is portrayed to be by most modernists steeped in presentism. He should never be placed in the same sentence as Trump unless the word “contrast” or “opposite” is used. Let's keep Old Hickory away from any such comparisons and let his image remain on that $20 bill!Well I learned something from that email — so many thanks. Meacham is a good idea too. Get full access to The Weekly Dish at andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe