Um we have all of his Bruno books it’s been wonderful so this is book 16 and we’re here to talk about Bruno and his Many Adventures Martin and I have been out to dinner and had a sort of discussion about what might be going on with Bruno in the future and you’ll be
Happy to know that he’s completing writing Bruno 17 yes as we speak right so Sheriff great to all of you so is this a Bruno cuve this is this is you have to hold that up this is the fourth hello can you all hear me this is the fourth wine good evening
Everybody um there’s that British voice in the middle of the whole French thing so funny this is the fourth wine that I’ve made I only make it in very good years and I don’t grow The Grapes myself I get them in from various friends of
Mine who are wine makers and then with a a chap called Julia mfor who has a very very good Vineyard uh called chat LEC um but I we make the wine in his uh in his coup in his uh in his in his uh in his sh uh in his wine making place
And um then we store it for between 8 months and a year uh in uh in the COV in the in the uh in the aluminium COV and then for several months in Oak before we release it and this is um this is a particularly good one I think it’s
Always a mixture like all classic Bordeaux grapes bordeau wines and bearak wines it’s a mixture of cabet FR cabet Soo and a little bit of malbeck which is optional but I always put some malbeck in there because it was the wine that was served at the wedding of Eleanor of
Aiten back in the year 1137 which is a very long time ago and it’s still the name of the of the black wine of kahar uh malbeck we call it cot but u in the world knows it as malbeck and it’s a very famous wine in Argentina
These days but uh I have great fun making this wine and I felt that I had to do so because um some years ago I was made uh I had a great honor I was made into um a grand Consul of the dein de beak which is the organization of the
Wines of beak which was founded in the year 1254 which is what 230 years before Columbus found America and in all of those 770 years I’m the first Scotsman ever to become a grand console so I feel very very good about that indeed it’s a great disappointment
To me that Martin doesn’t travel with his robes because they really I mean he looks he looks like a medieval wine maker is what he looks like one of the one of the Lesser known things about the French and you have to sort of live
There to sort of get this is that they they love to dress up and they love to gather in little clubs and have dinners together and eat a lot and so in the in the peror we have lots of these little brotherhoods these confer so uh as I’ve said I’m a grand
Consul of the wines of bearak I’m a maistra a magistrate of the wines of the morel I’m a Chevalier of landoor the Golden Grape of Sak uh I’m on the jurad of the wines of dura uh this summer I was made into a member of the confer of the confer dun
NOA the walnuts because I use walnuts to make my vonoa my Walnut wine um I’m a member I’m a uh I’m in the fraternity ofagra I’m in the fraternity of p paror uh I’m in the fraternity truth to Al um it is an extraordinary it takes forever just
Every every one of these things every three or four months there’s a there’s a dinner that one has to attend and one of them um which you’ll find a reference to in the book is I am a I am a a Chevalier of um of shab in the land of Mont now
The in the if you have any copies of my collection of short stories Bruno’s Challenge and Other Stories there’s one about shabal in there which given my position as a member of the Brotherhood is virtual heresy because the official explanation in France of the term shabal
Is that the great Mont in the 16th century was fleeing a case of the an outbreak of plague in his area in the morel and he came came Upstream towards uh towards Salah and found a refuge in a poor man’s home who could only afford to
Feed him by giving him a bowl of soup into which he would pour a glass of wine and the man said this is why there is no plague here M because I I have this system and when um when the plague had pass and monia was leaving and thanking
The man and uh he asked his name and it was Miss shab and so the confer shab is known as the confy of shab Don mon however I dispute this explanation as do many others um the mayor of my of my Village has always argued that if you
Go back to the Latin uh for cabriola which is the Latin for a goat and it’s still the name cabol is still the name that’s used in Prov it means basically to drink like a goat and you get your mustache and your beard wet like a goat
Gets it but my view is different I uh I argue very strongly that there are only two PL two places in the whole of France that call this custom of pouring a glass of red wine into your soup they call it chabrol and that is the the southwest of
France Bordeaux and the peror and Normandy and what those two areas had in common was was several centuries of English soldiers occupying The Chateau the castles year in year out because for three centuries it was held by the English and um the English had to feed their garrisons of soldiers throughout
The winter when food was fairly scarce in those days and they fed them they sent over barrels of pickled herring now pickled herring is we’ll keep you alive but it’s not very tasty and um and so quite understandably the English would try and Vary a bit by
Pouring in some cheap wine which would improve the taste of the Herring and of the wine um and if you if you check on the English term for a young Herring it’s shad and the traditional English term for soup soup is a French word the English word was broth say together
Shard broth Shard broth Shard broth the defense rests I reckon it’s an English it’s a version of the of the shabal which which came from the English soldiers there some there’s some there are some seats at the front if you would like and Amy do we have more wine back
Here yeah all right we’re serving F oh well i’ have to have a taste of that um but I think I find it really intriguing that that in the peror region of France we have this this sense of tradition about the food and about the
Wine one of my friends who runs a a place called chatau bellingar uh which is famous for two reasons one it is a site where the first sword blows were exchanged to begin the 100 Years War Between the English and the French but also because it’s probably the oldest Vineyard in France
That on the site of this Chateau is an old carved wooden a carved Stone Throne which dates back to Druid times and the horticulturalists and the experts in the history of wine reckon this was the first Vineyard in France when the grapes were very very tiny and rather bitter
But The Druids would make them into a kind of fluid that they would they would pass around and I just find it extraordinary to think that I am drinking wine that’s made on the very spot where it was made of 2,000 years ago I think it’s good God and it’s um
It’s this sense of History just pervades everything in the peror we are defined pretty much there by the rivers and the landscape and they Define the foods to this day the rivers don’t just give us the fish and indeed the the pike the trout the sturgeon would you believe we
Now have our own caviar from the sturgeon in the Doon you now the river has been cleaned propably again properly again but those Rivers were traditionally until the dams were built Upstream would tradition the rivers would traditionally flood these great flat Meadows of the of the valleys and
That was why we became famous for ducks and geese because these ducks and geese on their long long flights of migration they would they would flap their way over the dooron area and they look down and say oh look all these great water Meadows where every spring and every
Autumn the rivers overflow their backs oh look it’s Sant trapz and down they would go and breed and have ducklings and um and give us eventually the the the uh the fuagra and the um and the wonderful food of Ducks the other thing which has struck me as with great
Pleasure I’ve been I’ve become a a sort of amateur archaeologist and a great follower of the archaeology of the area and about six or seven years ago for the first time the archaological scientists were able to assess and to investigate the tataa on the or the plaque on the teeth of prehistoric
Skulls to the point where they could actually start to identify what they’d been eating and no they didn’t live on brontosaurus legs or no no they they were close to being vegetarians for large parts of the year until you think what were they eating and it turns out and I should
Have realized this because when I was in Southeast Asia in the Mong Valley I remember being in a place called langang prabang in La where they have the the annual River Festival at the spring flooding of the river and everything is served on top of a kind of a duckweed
Green the green stuff that that grows in rivers and it’s fairly tasteless but it turns out to be nutritious and that was one of the prime one of the Prime uh one of the Prime foods of the neander Thousand Crow Magnum people 20 30 40 50,000 years ago I mean imagine that
And so I’ve I’ve become very very very interested in this whole history of of food in the area and um you will find that an awful lot of the recipes that we have in the in the Bruno cookbook are indeed of uh of some of some venerable tradition I’m particularly pleased to
Have found that the first really internationally famous French chef before k and and the celebrated 9th century chefs was in the 18th century was a man called Noel Andre Noel who was exported from the perigo to one of the famous tables of Europe what had happened was that Frederick the
Great the King of Prussia was a friend of vol and Frederick said look I’ve just been building this Palace outside Berlin called s sui which will be a very small Palace for me and some Chums like you voler and there’ll be never never be any
More than eight or 10 of us there but I want a really First Rate Chef can you arrange for me a Top Chef to come to Berlin and be my private cook and so voler gets in touch with a man called Noel who had a reputation in Paris
Because he he was sending up to Paris the first PTI de perer which was fagra in the center topped with Truffles and covered with uh a kind of a pork Brawn that was simply in order to keep it fresh enough so he could get from the
Perago up to Paris and so Vol who knew this man wrote him and said got this offer for you private Chef King of Prussia Frederick the great what do you think and Noel thought well I’m getting a bit old for this but I’ve got this son
Who’s a pretty good Chef Andre Noel he went to through Berlin to Brandenburg as the chef of Frederick the great and Frederick the great fell in love with him I mean in a in a sort of a a culinary way and he began writing poetry to Andre Noel and called him the Caesar
Of the cuisine and it’s amazing to think of it and I was doing I Serv quite a lot of books in Germany and I was actually at sansus and I was doing a reading there and I told this story and uh the Germans thought ah this long tradition
Of the color the food of the peror and of and of the King of Prussia so I love all of this history stuff when it a lot of it comes into the cookbook a lot of it comes into my novels um I just find that I find these things genuinely
Interesting and if I get interested in something I want to research it and write about it and get more and more involved in it and I’ve never been anywhere in my life that has more history festooned around every corner and every castle and every town than the
Peror it just shrieks at you I mean I can walk from from where I live I can walk about 10 minutes and I come to a place called lafi it’s lafi is the world’s oldest grave it’s the oldest place we know where human beings Buried one another with ritual and with respect
There are eight bodies there one of them a woman in her 30s and the pollen is still around her neck from where they had flowers there there were children there each head protected by a ring of stones as it were uh and then there’s a man there who could not have W walked
For about 10 years his leg had been completely smashed they fed him they kept him alive he couldn’t hunt he couldn’t as it were earn his way but he was taken care of and that’s one of the great definitions of a human community and it’s 73,000 years old
Imagine that I mean it’s just to me it’s mindboggling and um and I keep coming across this kind of thing if I walk in the other direction I get to a place called liay which is a wonderful old Hill Hilltop Fortress um the Galls had a Hilltop Fortress there Julius Caesar’s
Legion stormed the place and he buil to Roman opom and then charlam man you had a fortress there against the against the Vikings the French and the English swapped control of a medieval castle on the hilltop throughout the Middle Ages and I um when I was first pottering
Around this this Hilltop I came across a wonderful old deep well and I remember thinking I’m going to have a body in that well and I did uh uh but um but it’s see what really really struck me about it is you as you walk down from the hilltop down into
This ex lovely old medieval French town with a long curly sloping Street and most of the houses are also like little shops because it was a Riverside Port Two Rivers come together there the r the doia and that meant they could tax it it was it paid for itself with the taxes on
The trade that went by the rivers and um but even more to the point you come down one particular corner and there is a a tiny little Park about the size of where you and I are sitting here um and that Park is where about 80 years ago they
Were trying to enlarge a basement and they came across several hundred small stones flat Stones about the size of my two hands together that this kind of size on every one of these stones and there were about 12200 of them were found there’s either there was engraved
Either um either a kind of a horse or a donkey or a horse um a snake um a deer and a boar some of them have legs sort of scratched out and redrawn and re-engraved or the tail scratched out and redone the only explanation that the archaeologists have for this it was was
The world’s first art school about 13,000 years ago I mean imagine that I mean you hear this you to think my mind has just been blown 13,000 years ago art school this is the peror and on top of that it’s got the best food in France as my favorite
King oricat Henry IV the only French King to give his name to a Dish pul orat as he said ah The paragor Great Food wonderful wines and such pretty girls it’s Paradise on Earth and I think he was right it really is anyway sorry no it’s wonderful but I mean the
Cookbook reflects there but you know we should talk just briefly about the geology because one of the reasons there were all these ancient people there was that it’s a limestone area and therefore there were caves and overhangs if you think about the anast Sai up north of us
You know it’s the same thing it was shelter um and also because of the Limestone it developed the rivers you know because it could flow if you’ve gone to this area you could go to the museum the prehistoric museum at leai which is uh fascinating and um for a
Long time it was thought that the Neanderthal and the chroman and others didn’t didn’t breed together but now they’ve decided that all of us actually have some Neanderthal in us um and so that Museum which is in one of your books at least one there’s a blowout
Scene I know but there’s one that has a sort of terrorist climax in the museum I was worried you were going to blow it up and then have to explain to the museum people why you did that didn’t get didn’t get blown up I I cleared it with them beforehand yeah and they’re
Delighted now as a result of that I mean because we sell an awful lot of books in Germany and as a result of that particular book they decided to put German translations alongside the English translations under the French trans so it’s and they they got a grant
From the European Union in Brussels to pay for that which I thought was very smart as well very smart so this is why there are caves at Lasco there are caves that you can go go into I’ve been in a couple of them and you know there’s
Actually a little river is it um what is it R that’s um that’s the the well there were several with river flowing rivers in them um pumac pumac has got the lake and the flowing river uh there’s the worn down by Road um begins with a p
Whose name is on the tip of my tongue right we’re both getting older so it tast longer for us to remember this thing you know there’s part of the um part of the road that goes to Santiago to castella it goes um roam madur is a stop there’s um there’s a French tourist
Pilgrim Way that goes there’s a Spanish I’m trying to remember like four different routs at least that go to Santiago and one goes through kadan right um and kadwa Kadar is a a love a beautiful um early medieval early medieval uh monry and it was given by
King Richard the lionart who was King of England but also um he was also the Duke of aiten end of the 12th century he came back from the Third Crusade um with a robe that apparently had been the robe under which the dead Jesus had Lain for
3 days before coming back from the dead so of course it was an extraordinary major major Relic and it was held put on display in kadwa for centuries and every year there’d be special pilgrimages to the kadwa the center to to go and see the robe and to worship and pray and
Miracles were were ascribed to the presence of this place until in 1934 a very intelligent and well educated Jesuit happened to be uh stationed there for a year and he said this particular robe he said um do you does anybody else here speak medieval Arabic no said well what it says here is
There is but one God and Muhammad is his prophet and it was 11th century medieval Arabic sort of already 100 years old when poor old Richard lionhart bought the thing um they now reckon that there are so many pieces of the so-called true cross uh that are in various sites in
France and Italy that that’s enough to build a medieval warship I mean so um the the the people of Jerusalem and The Holy Land back in the 11th 12th 13th century they really were pretty sharp in realizing they could sell down near anything nails oh yes oh these certainly
Absolutely were used to nail Jesus to the cross and so on and so forth but Kadar is one of the great examples of a a wonderful religious fraud that lasted for 800 years amazing so the cookbook is a great place to explore um the locavore
Cuisine so to speak I want to make the raspberry Walnut mering that’s my goal but there are there’s a tart there’s um all kinds of wonderful dishes in the books so you can feel as though um and their photographs of Martin doing various cooking kinds of things so it’s
A great um there is in fact one photograph of a real Miracle which is of me exclaiming in surprise when my tat tat actually worked uh but um know Julia and I my wife and I had great great fun uh making this making this cookbook and indeed
Learning what we did about the about the cuisine of of the region there’s one dish I’m very very proud of which is the one I invented um you many of you will have eaten B bu which is basically a stew of beef in Burgundy wine and I thought well why not
In our own bearak wine so I invented something which is a little bit different with mushrooms and so on with Chantel um which I call B alod as opposed to b b and I’m very very proud of that uh I’m also proud of one of the dishes that is ascribed in the
Novels to Pamela who is a scotswoman and it’s a dish I learned at my mother’s knee and it’s called fish pie and it’s uh it’s a mixture of smoked fish and white fish in a kind of a bamal sauce and then uh hardboiled eggs on top uh
And um and mashed potatoes grat and it’s a delicious fish pie my my French friends adore it I make it quite often one of the and one of the reasons that I learned to really to cook when I when I left home my mom had made sure I could
Just about make it on my own so I could certainly do any kind of omelette eggs on toast uh spaghetti bolog uh beef stew I mean the basics and the fish pie I could handle anything else was Way Beyond my pay grade um but then uh with Julia I began to learn more
And more and more about cooking because Julia we’ve now been married 45 years and in that time she has she has had her way with me and all sorts of uh so she insisted that at least once a week I had to cook and it had to be different every
Time uh made a m of me I can tell you I can tap that story because when I was very young um I was a senior at Stanford and married my first husband and a wedding present that I got from him um was two volumes of larus
Gastronomic and inside was a card that said to Barbara optimistically which I always loved and I I learned to make a bomb I that was something I could do um very easily I have to say that most of the recipes um in L for Beyond me but it’s a two volume
Leather bround set I still have it um and it’s wonderful anyway Bruno you’ll be happy to know continues to cook in the 16th book and he has his garden and you know gathers up his friends so maybe we should spare a word or two for the actual book what do you think which
Think the novel yes yeah the um well I was struck when when you picked me up today from from the hotel where I’m staying um almost the very first thing you said after the usual oh good to see you John ifications cheer and so on was you
Talked about the tax regime of South Dakota I did I wanted to go into because Martin embedded in this book is some incredible Financial advice which I know nothing about which I am well okay but I’m planning to call my trustee attention to this so but that’s jumping
In don’t you think we ought to set it up before you talk about the tax people in South Dakota or do you want no we’ve got them now let’s just talk about it well it’s it’s part of the plot it really is um it is part of the plot I mean one of
The one of the extraordinary Pleasures about writing these sorts of books is if I if I get sort of interested in something quite out of the normal way of a French detective story I can find a way to shoe haul it into the novel and so I was I had this character
A Frenchman who had been one of the early generation um of of guys in Silicon Valley one of the people in at the birth of of of Google and was paid as many of them were in shares and became extremely rich as a result and
Had to find a way to protect his money from the French tax authorities and I did some research and came across the this extraordinary uh friend of mine Oliver Bullock has written a very very good book about the international tax fraud system that um there was a governor of
South dakot South Dakota a former Marine called jankovich who um became a hero when he was campaigning for the governorship and he took his he took his rifle along to a hostage situation which instantly went onto local television and he he won in the landslide next time and
He was thinking how on Earth do we make South Dakota into a how do we get some tax money how do we get some finance and he had this idea okay let us make ourselves into a financial center now this was the early 80s which you might
Recall a time of very high inflation because the uh the federal reserve put Paul vuler at the time raised interest rates to try and stop inflation which succeeded um but at the time it was a real problem for banks and credit card companies because under 1930s legislation there was a limit how much
Interest they could charge on the credit cards and they were actually losing money on the credit cards and so this guy and this governor of South Dakota uh passed a local state law which spared them from this City Bank moved its headquarters into South Dakota and the state never looked back the next
Thing that they did was they invented the Perpetual trust now the Perpetual trust goes on forever if you were have you let say for example you had a million dollars right now you put it into this Perpetual trust your great grandchildren will be sitting on something like $200 million because
Of the miracle of compound interest which is goes up and up and up now South Dakota has become one of the richest states in the USA simply because of this Perpetual trust system who knew anyway I got into I got interested I mean and the book I’m
Writing at the moment I’m I’ve I’ve got into the whole blockchain nonsense and uh oh believe me I mean trying to get my wrap my head around this complexity I not at all sure I I quite understand it yet but I love getting this kind of detail into the books because well I
It’s the kind of silly brain I’ve got I guess and I get enthusiastic about things and start writing about them I start researching them but yes sorry there we are that was the South Dakota but but what what’s fun for the books I think is how International they are
Despite the fact that we are in a small village you know in the dord sand uh and that’s certainly one aspect of it but what thought was wonderful and I’m actually planning to go and rent the Chateau for two or three nights um is that there is a real chatau if you get
Our E news I gave you a link to it but you can Google it and you want to describe it to us because obviously you got their permission to kill people there um yes it’s a wonderful It’s a Wonderful medieval Chateau that was restored a bit in the 19th century uh
And it’s on a it’s on a a Hilltop overlooking the river Doon and it’s called the shat de ruak and historically it’s got quite a lot to uh it’s got quite a long story just on the far side of the river is the chadow of feno and fenor is one of the
The great names of French history um the the the family of fenor had been since the 13th century quite regularly the Abbotts of Salah the great Cathedral Town um but this particular fenol was he was born in the late 17th century and he became the father of the
Enlightenment he was he became a uh he made his name in Paris because of his belief in educating women or educating girls and he opened a school for Wellborn young women in the 1690 168 which became became very very fashionable and Louie 14th was extremely proud of this on the grounds nowhere
Else in Europe were were women being educated like this and so Louis the 14th made fenol into the tutor of his son the DOA who would be the next king and Fen law was not entirely 100% devotedly monarchist let me put it that way in fact he he was he wrote a book
Called tarcus now Tel Marcus was the name of the son of ulyses in the in Homer’s Siege of Troy and ulyses came home to his wife Penelope and the son tarcus and this book is about the way in which tarcus is entrusted by ulyses to a special tutor who takes him around the
Old classical world to teach him how to be a just and fair and wise and good king and the name and this is where we get the meaning of it the name of this tutor is Mentor which is how we get the word Mentor into our own language but this
Book went into every European language over a hundred editions of it were sold it was perhaps the first International bestseller and the difficulty was it was a bit liberal and said that the good King had to be fair and just to his people and had to listen to his
People and had to keep the law himself and there was a man called bosu who was a very conservative uh Cardinal who was also the uh the Confessor to Louis the 14th and bosway kept saying this is dangerous stuff that this young man is writing your highness uh and
Anyway so um so fenor is sacked but his book really became as it were the opening of the Enlightenment cited by everybody by Gerta and dero and montis and so on um and his castle is just across the river from from from from ruak and it’s been beautifully restored
It’s also where um Thomas Jefferson who was a great believer in and a great admirer of uh of of uh um of of this famous of of of of feno um he went down to this part of the world to to pay homage at the chatau def feno and he
Stayed at rufc and he would write letters there in the library and there’s a wonderful bust of him there at the desk of which he wrote and all of the bathro the bedro rooms have been redone in a beautiful way and it’s owned by a Charming couple from Silicon Valley um
And who had enough money to restore it had enough moneyb essentially is the reason I said I could go there and it turns out they were great fans of Bruno so i’ I’ve been invited there a few times and uh uh it’s very and I and I
Thought this would be a rather nice place to have to have a meeting of Silicon Valley types and because as you perhaps know there’s a lot of concern not just in America but in Europe too about uh an awful lot of the state-of-the-art uh state-of-the-art things that we need
In Computing are being made in Taiwan and taiwan’s future looks a little bit difficult do you know that we actually turned away the guy that is the he was wanted to start a chip manufacturing site here in Arizona and we turned him away and he went to Taiwan
And created the world’s biggest and now he’s back and he’s yep but that’s why and you know talk about short-sightedness here I don’t don’t know who was in charge in Arizona but not a Forward Thinking operation but the reason that gold water I don’t know I don’t know that it
Was cwat but anyway the reason that the Chateau is important in the book is that they’re basically becomes kind of a Siege situation and because of the way the Chateau is built and the grounds around it Bruno and various um enforcement agencies are able to isolate these people who may be under
Threat in the chatau and keep track of them so I thought there could be worse places than to be held under siege right I that thought had crossed my mind and not only did cross my mind but um within walking distance of the Shadow itself is
Is an old Roman Camp so for 2,000 years this particular hilltop’s defensive possibilities have been have been quite clear right so we see Bruno um in a in a kind of different role because he’s not so much that he’s being a policeman investigating a murder as then he’s
Concerned with security and um you know all he walks the grounds and he figures out where everybody should be so where it starts is we’re in SAA um which is a a Wonder beautiful city I once spent a week there um with a Northwestern alumni group and
I fell in love with it for a whole lot of reasons um and it’s one of those towns that still is Medieval I mean it’s been modernized but it reminds me of tal and Estonia and places like that you you’ll recall that um uh when dul came
In into came back into power in 195 1958 um one of the first laws he pushed through was a law to preserve national monuments and he got his minister of culture Andre malro a novelist to sort of as it were make this to make this law
Into a reality and the place he began to take an entire town and preserve it but in a modern kind of way with Salah and uh then he did it to Paris and he cleaned all of the blackened buildings that are now wonderful Brown and Golden
Stone and so on uh but Salah was the first masterpiece like this and um I I’ve now I realized I’ve now said in two or three novels that this is the one place in the world where if you just change the shop Windows you could film The Three Musketeers whenever you want
You know it’s that’s true it’s not it is and there is a prison there because I remember touring the prison and and um there’s a restaurant that’s pretty good by there there’s also um a number a number of communities called and they are wonderful they’re
Also is one of them well it is and I have a I have a beautiful set of steak knives with Chestnut Wood handles and beautiful silver on the handles and so forth that I bought in one of them you can’t drive in them you have to park and
You know hike your way down into these beautiful Villages so Francis done a a great job in keeping them together but so what’s going on in saara is there’s a reenactment and um the principal the principal um Knight what’s his name geese GCL the gesler all right he’s riding in on a on
A horse and um he’s like the centerpiece of this pageant that’s going to go on and the horse slips and he but he falls things go wrong things go very wrong and it turns out that this guy is in fact if you ever get to if you you ever get to
Uh to to Salah go down about 5 miles to the Doon River and you’ll come to a beautiful Hilltop town called Dum which is a a glorious medieval town but just a bit further along that same Ridge is the French equivalent of Fort Meade Maryland it’s their it’s the center of their
Intelligence electronic intelligence and monitoring service it’s also the place from which they communicate to their nuclear sub their ballistic nuclear submarines um and it’s it’s monitoring much of the world in fact good one good friend of mine uh an English guy who’s been there for
About 40 years he went there to be a a teacher of English in one of the several language schools they have around Dom to make sure that the eer the listeners can pick up every last bit of whatever they’re hearing and they’ve got people who have been trained to be able to
Understand a Bengali speaking English to a Nigerian speaking English now I’m not sure I could necessarily understand that kind of telephone communication but these French guys can uh skilled at doing all this it is one of the most one of the most top secret parts of Europe I
Have to say um but anyway I it’s a well-known secret in the area it’s an Open Secret so I wrote about that as well and the the guy so the guy who is um the guy who is who is wounded or perhaps killed at this opening scene of the reenactment of the
Battle of the liberation of Salat from the English in the year 1370 this man kekla um is in fact the head of this particular this particular center of the eator um and I also go on to point out that you’ll recall that it used to be
Said that the British the Sun never sets on the British Empire because it was all over the world that’s no longer the case for us Brits it is still the case for the French because if you go if you start going west from France up in the mouth
Of St Lawrence of the St Lawrence River you get uh s in South America you get guina which is also the current cap capital of the European Space Program because it’s where the the French allow the uh the planes to take off you go across into
The Pacific and you come to Tahiti and papit French territory you go further south towards Australia Nel caledoni new calonia French territory you go across to the Indian Ocean and you have the IL reun French territory and in each of these places oh and also south of Cape Town between
South Africa and Antarctica is kealan like the name of kealan the this particular chap it’s um an island on all of these islands you have French listening posts the French intelligence system circles the world the Sun never sets on French intelligence and hard for you to say is a Brit no no
No no the Sun never sets on the British Empire you’re okay with it not sitting on the French look I’m I I’m a Scotsman I’m a Brit I’m a European I’m a trans atlanticist I’m a human being I mean now that Queen Elizabeth is gone I feel a
Great deal less of the sentimental attachment to Britain than I did I still feel some but not quite so much to Charles not in the way I did for Elizabeth um but I don’t know I’m I I’m not that much of a a Union Jack waiver I mean I’m very proud of
Being a Scott and of being a Brit and of being part of Europe and of having spent at least half of my adult life in the United States I mean I am not a stranger here I mean I may sound it but um I’ve lived what 30 years of my
Life here um so I may not sound like one of you but you know I know many of your little ways I even like quite a lot of your food we had a rather good dinner tonight didn’t we they absolutely did we always do when Martin’s here you guys don’t
Realize it but most of the authors who come here actually come for dinner which the actually does not support but I do we come for the we come for the company anyway um so we have this fellow slips off his horse and it’s helicoptered away and then bad things
May happen and so various people are sequestered uh in the Chateau de ridak and Bruno gets to show off how um really confident he is in security and more than that we probably can’t tell you um but it does bring in a number of Bruno’s um cohorts from the various other
Policing and security forces in France because Bruno is actually Brest from the village policeman he’s now in charge of the vzer valley so he has a much bigger remit than he used to he has a much bigger remit and but he’s also now brought in quite frequently into this
When something comes up in this area that involves French intelligence right because he’s just worked with them before um and it’s great fun for me to get into to this particular area as well and it also helps that there his great love Isabelle is herself working in this
Particular field um and um I should add that this book was actually written before Russia invaded Ukraine but it’s pretty clear it’s coming um I think those of us who me I spent four years in living in Moscow in the 1980s in the time of gorbachov and parist America I
Speak Russian and um those of us who know Russia were in very little doubt what was happening under under Putin and what was coming it’s got that whole pan slav Vision right of bring it back so we also you’ll be happy to know that BAC is
Alive and Well Hector is still there to be ridden on day and is a father yes that’s right no not Hector B yeah right no I know but I’d progress to Hector so I didn’t want there’s not a f there’s actually a puppy involved here right so
Uh those of you who remember XII who you know died a heroic death um are happy to know that bzac is there and then various of the Village People the mayor one of my personal favorite characters the mayor is still there and still smarter than everybody else yeah he’s he’s just
Fabulous you know I haven’t understood why he hasn’t risen to be president of France well what what would be the fun in that compared to running sandon that’s right absolutely true so but I think you know we all love the cast of characters right it isn’t just Bruno but
It’s the whole the whole group there and of course it’s the food you know if you remember Black Diamond which is the third I think um you know it’s all about truffles right I mean that’s the whole point of Black Diamond that was number three I said that third third yeah yeah
That’s right right so you know Tres are valuable commodity but you have managed to keep food that was it was that that book the uh the with about the truffles that got me made into a a honorary citizen of sant Al and um one of the uh one of the fraternity
The truth to S Al so I mean this is yet another of the sort of confere and brotherhoods where we uh it’s basically the French love an excuse to dress up and have a good meal with friends it’s uh isn’t this not true yeah yeah questions from all of you what would you
Like to ask Martin feel free the last book it sort of felt like be pushed toward for but is there hope for Bruno and isab um I’m I’m really not sure um Bruno hasn’t told me yet um but it’s clear that all of his friends are sort of pushing him towards towards Florance
Thinking that she’s just the right kind kind of girl for him um but Bruno is not quite so sure there was there was a kind of a magic between him and Israel that he’s not sure he can live without or that uh can he live with a woman can he
Devote his life to a woman who didn’t who doesn’t thrill him in the way that Isabelle did um I don’t know it’s uh I’m I’m very bad look I’m a guy I’m very I’m very bad at reading women you see so um uh one thing
I should tell you is that uh we we have two daughters Julia and I and we were all together Julia and Kate and and Fanny our two girls uh sitting on the Terrace and uh having a sharing a bottle of wine and Fanny says Dad we all know
That there’s a there is a model for Bruno there is a inspiration from Bruno that’s your tennis partner your Chum Piero their Village policeman and I think there’s another inspiration and I think there is uh I think there is an inspiration for a key woman and I said really and Fanny said
Yes she said look she said Pamela is a scotswoman mom is a scotswoman Pamela rides horse Mom rides horses Pamela’s a great cook mom is a great cook Pamela’s got red hair and this month mom’s got red hair so that means mom is the model for for Pamela and Julia said no Fanny
Absolutely not not at all however perhaps for Isabel and because I know how little I know about women I decided i’ better say nothing at all um so I’m I’m sure these things will work out I mean Bruno will find his way to uh to the right kind of future um and
Um I’m sure he will yes but I don’t know what it is yet he hasn’t told me I’ve told you but I don’t count you’re not the only one right we won’t we won’t go into our confidential conversation right so who else would like to ask a
Question are any of the characters based on people you know there I’m sorry I didn’t quite catch are of people you met oh yes um oh yes several of them are uh the uh Bruno himself is based upon my Village policeman and who is my tennis partner
Uh because I mean I when I first when we first got the place which is what 25 years ago or so now uh in the peror and I was writing a book so I was there for several several weeks at a time and my one of my neighbors the baron uh began
Taking me down to the tennis club saying you needed to get a bit of exercise while writing and so every Friday morning he the baron and I and Pio The Village policeman and Michelle from Public Works a couple of other guys would be down there playing old men’s
Tennis which is where you have a glass of wine each down by the net you know um but the important thing was after the tennis about an hour and a half of that we then went into the tennis club where the largest room was the kitchen and we
Prepared lunch for ourselves and the baron would bring along steaks Bruno would bring Pio would bring along Truffles and eggs from his garden I’d bring along I’d do a whiskey tasting Scotch whiskey stuff and a great time was had by all it went on to about 5:00
In the evening and um that’s is where then the mayor would come along so this is where I began to get the cast of characters there was the baron there was P there was the mayor um so that’s how it got going one thing I do insist though is
That none of the women in real life are model for the women in Bruno’s life uh they’re all figments of my imagination and I say that to Julia and I say it to our daughters nobody ever believes [Laughter] me perhaps somewhat unrelated question of the paror your previous comments
Regarding the flat stones that were found with the animal yeah do you feel there’s a relationship directly between that and the art the Lasco cave the between that and the and the artwork in the Lasco cave oh well it’s it’s clear that there was a long tradition
Of of decorating the caves not just with paint but also with Engravings and so on and this is a tradition that keeps coming back and keeps being reborn so Las go is about 18,000 years ago these flat stones are 12 to 13,000 years ago uh Co is about 28,000 years ago so
Whether it’s very hard to be certain what happened in the gaps between these peaks of activity that we can track um but particularly because an awful lot of the Engravings in caves it’s very very hard to be sure about the dates of the Engravings um but it’s it’s clear that
This was this was something extraordinary in this area because there is nowhere else in the world we have anything like this concentration of Engravings and painting there’s about 130 engraved caves in the peror region and about 24 painted caves and it’s not just it’s not just Lasco there’s one called
Fondom which has it’s they’re hard to see but there is one particular series of images of a reindeer which is which is sick or dying and another reindeer is sort of giving it a kiss or a lick with Incredible tenderness and then uh below this there
Was sort of a ledge and a a declivity and inside that declivity are lots and lots of babies and little children’s hand prints and you can almost see them playing with the paints and putting their hands while Mom and Dad are doing the other thing is important is
Until it’s only about 20 years ago that people even began to accept the possibility that some of the artists might have been women and we now know that a lot of them were because women’s the proportion of the length of fingers tends to be rather different in women than men and from
These handprints it’s quite clear that an awful lot of the work was being done by women thank God it’s being recognized at last but um and I’m proud to say that in the very first novel I wrote called the caves of peror came out over 20 years ago there’s a woman artist in
There so I was the head of my time actually it’s just because I’m married to Julia and I know my place there’s the wonderful cave I can’t remember the name of it but when you go there you have to travel an enormous long way in ruak is it ruak ruak where
You have the little sort of train that you and you go in on this little train and it’s absolutely pitch black when you finally get in there and you recognize that they did that painting when they were carrying and they they we’ve talked about this before they figured out that
They had perfected light that wouldn’t smoke up the walls right they did I mean when you think about if you can see this at Lasco because it’s deep under around it must have been completely black inside and it’s white chalk so if they’d gone in with ordinary torches the smoke
Would have blackened the cave walls no what they did they found the only technology that would work that would give light without smoke and they made little Stone lamps with declivities in them rendered Rainer fat with a juniper twig as the as the wick and that Bur
Burns with a clear and smokeless light the other thing they invented was scaffolding because at Lasco an awful lot of the paintings are on the ceiling and they had to build scaffolding which meant inventing the idea of put building the sort of wooden structures but also inventing the knots and the kind of
String that would hold all this stuff together on their backs like Gabriel Al were stirring a painting somewhere in Venice they had to hike a really long way in at rufc though I mean you know I mean it’s a you take a little train to get to
Where the site is so I was trying to figure out they whether they carried those lights or whether they waited and lit them when they got wherever they were going it’s amazing um but it’s it’s about it’s a kilometer to go right all the way so you can go there now but Las
Go they’ve created a replica of it you can’t actually go into they made it this new yeah audiovisual modern oh oh yeah there’s a new they put a huge amount of money into it they put about 60 million 60 million into modernizing with a new Visitor Center and so on Lasco and some
Of the stuff that they’ve done is extraordinary I’d never before quite realized how many Engravings there were in Lasco because you only have eyes for the painting but when they and they have special uh special uh galleries that sort of highlight the actual Engravings um they’ve recreated some of the other
Deeper caves as well including the one famous one that I write about in in the caves of peror which is um the guy wearing the Eagle’s head and has an eagle’s beak and he’s dead and but he’s still holding a spear which is penetrating the belly of a bison and its
Intestines are falling out he’s got this sort of bird’s head and he’s got this huge huge spiky erection like a I don’t like some it’s an a frightening kind of thing um and that is there’s a a whole a whole gallery now devoted to try and understand this and the the other things
Beside it they think it was to do with a medicine man a kind of a shaman um wearing some kind of headdress and so on all very all very very strange and his um the staff the spear he’s holding has got has got a bird perched
On one end of it or a carving of a bird we just don’t know one of the things I love about this is that how many other historical things come into it because Lasco was was discovered rediscovered in the Autumn of 1940 when the Germans had already conquered France and they were occupying
Paris and northern France and this part of the paragor was part of the vichi France that the Germans were not occupying but the when the young boys from monyak found there was a storm the tree comes down um a dog goes down into a hole left by a falling tree dog
Disappears boy goes after dog gets down lights a cigarette lighter to look for his dog and suddenly thinks Jesus Christ he’s in the middle of the great Cave of Lasco and he comes out and they tell their School Master he and his fellow school boy mates they tell their school
Teacher who comes up with the local mayo and they think wow and so the school teacher writes to the ab BR who was a Churchman who was at the time the great archaeologist of of of Europe and the ab BR was only I think the fifth or sixth
Man to come and see Lio to come and see Lasco and he goes back to Paris and he gets in touch with a friend of his an artist who had consulted the ab when he was interested in prehistoric paintings of various kinds and the history of painting and this artist was called
Picasso so about the eighth or nth person to visit Lasco is Picasso and he comes out and he says we have met our masters we have learned nothing in all of these thousands of years now story doesn’t end have you ever wondered why it was that Picasso anti-nazi communist the guy who painted
Guanica the biggest condemnation of the Nazis of from the Spanish Civil War how did he manage to live and work in Paris throughout the Nazi occupation without ever being touched or bothered it was because of a a man called Ernst Jer youve probably all heard of the
Novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria remark the biggest seller in Germany in the 20s and 30s was called storm of Steel stal storm by Ernst Jer it was Hitler’s favorite novel because it’s about the same area of the Western Front against British troops where
Hitler was based and Hitler was gassed in the course of the first world war and so was en Jer Hitler adored this book Jer was an aristocrat who despised this jumped up this little Austrian Corporal nonetheless Hitler said I want this guy to be the vermar ambassador the German
Army’s ambassador to the intelligencia of Paris because if we can win over the intelligencia like Jean CTO and so on then we will have France and so Ann juger is sent to Paris unlimited budget has a suite at the cre hotel and every time that the uh that the Gestapo says
We want to go and have a look at this uh this painting Gea Picasso no no no says Yer and when they when they say we want to go and see this American Jewish woman gud Stein no no no no no that would interfere with my project of winning over the French intelligen
Here aner saved Picasso and so on anyway so um Picasso gets back to Paris and yer comes into the studio and Picaso says you’re not going to believe this I’ve just come back from Lasco you’ve got to go down to the perigo and see this and
So Yer arranges to go down in his uniform German officer and so on and he goes down with a colleague a man from an officer from the German medical service who had been a well-known chemist in Germany called Dr Hoffman and down they go to Lasco now those of you who were
Around in the late 1960s and early 1970s might remember the name of Dr Hoffman as the inventor of LSD so I have this mental image of an Junger and Hoffman wow heavy as they go around last you couldn’t make this up could you I think we should end up on that I
Mean we can’t get any better so please give Martin a hand and thank him very much for coming tonight it’s always it’s always a pleasure usually he’s here in the summer when it’s so hot but this is very nice that he’s had a beautiful evening this
Evening so I think that that Bruno and the cookbook together make a really great combination but you could give the cookbook to people who don’t actually read Bruno and
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