Richard Evans, Rosemary Ashton, Tim Blanning on 'The Riddle of the Sands' - How Britain learned to fear the Germans [audio 43min]

In 1903 an Englishman called Charles Caruthers went sailing in the North Sea and stumbled onto a German military plot. The cunning plan was to invade the British Isles from the Frisian Islands using special barges. The plucky Caruthers foiled the plot and returned to his sailing holiday. This is not history but fiction, an immensely popular book called The Riddle of the Sands. It was a prescient vision of two nations soon to fight the First World War, but it went against the spirit of the previous century. Brits and Germans had fought together at Waterloo and had influenced profoundly each other’s thought and art. They even shared a royal family. Yet somehow victory at Waterloo and the shared glories of Romanticism became the mutual tragedy of the Somme. Presenter Melvyn Bragg investigates the history of ideas and debates their application in modern life with his guests Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge; Rosemary Ashton, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London; Tim Blanning, Professor of Modern European History at Cambridge University. Baron Bragg - historian, journalist, novelist - is Domus Fellow, St Catherine's College, Oxford; Chancellor of Leeds University; President of Britain's National Campaign for the Arts; a Governor of the London School of Economics; and Chair of Britain's Arts Council Literature Panel.