Tim Bouverie is a best-selling, award-winning historian and former political commentator, whose history books Appeasing Hitler and the new Allies at War are detailed, nuanced, and absolutely enthralling. We therefore jumped at the chance to talk with him at Chalke History Festival this year, to find out more about his thoughts on the past - and on the present.

Your new book, Allies at War, has just been released. What can you tell me about it?

We're all very familiar with a lot of the military encounters that led to victory in 1945. But the political and diplomatic story is both more complicated and less well understood than it should be. So, the ambition for the book was to write a complete history of anti-Axis politics throughout the Second World War, obviously focused on the Big Three – the British Empire, the United States and the Soviet Union – but which went beyond that in scope to include Anglo-French relations between 1939 and 1940; relations with General de Gaulle and the Free French; diplomacy with important neutral countries including Francoist Spain, neutral Ireland and sphinx-like Turkey; the Iraqi Revolt of May 1941 and subsequent five-week war between the British and Gaullists on the one hand and the Vichy French on the other, in Syria and Lebanon; Allied relations with liberated Italy, war-torn Yugoslavia and occupied Poland; British intervention in Greece in 1941 and 1944; and finally relations with that vast, complex and so frequently neglected ally nationalist China.

A lot of the major players of the 1930s and ‘40s had huge personalities. Did you warm to any particularly? Were you repulsed by any?

I think it's very hard not to warm to Churchill because he is so honest. Even when he gets things wrong – and he gets a lot of things wrong – there's very little dissemblance in him. He is an up-front, highly emotional character who wears his heart on his sleeve and therefore, even when he's getting things wrong, even when he's being bloody, when he's being obstreperous and unreasonable, there's something very human about him, which is endearing. I found Franklin Roosevelt a much harder character to warm to. The closer I got to him, in fact, the further away he seemed to get. Because almost everything that you can say about FDR, you can also say the opposite. He was the most open and charming of politicians, and yet he was also cold and devious. He was one of the great idealists of the twentieth century, and yet he was also a consummate politician with all the requisite cynicism. He had a genuine sympathy for the destitute, and was to some extent an egalitarian. And yet he had an unshakable sense of himself as a patrician and, frankly, a fetish for European royalty, many of whom were in exile in the United States. And he described himself as a juggler – ‘I never let my right hand know what my left hand is doing' – and I think even he didn't know what he was about some of the time.

How much did his illness affect him?

His paralysis from polio gave him an element of compassion. He was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. But having suffered this enormous adversity and overcome it to become governor of New York, vice-presidential candidate and then elected president four times was an incredible achievement, and I think it gave him empathy with those that struggled in America. And there's never been a time when people have struggled more in America than during the Great Depression. Later on, during the war, he was getting more and more ill, and by the Yalta Conference he only had six weeks to live. There has been an idea, indeed almost a conspiracy theory, that due to his lack of physical well-being at Yalta, he ended up making concessions to Stalin, which he might not otherwise have made. But this is a fallacy. I think that the policy he pursued at Yalta was consistent with the policy he had pursued since 1942, and the sheer reality of the situation on the ground in 1945 was that the Red Army was already in possession of most of Eastern Europe, and there was precious little the British and the Americans could do to remove them.

I believe you quote the line in your book, that the Second World War didn't make the world safe for democracy, but for communism.

It's one of the great ironies that this war, which was meant to make the world safe for democracy, and was being waged by the British and the Americans on behalf of small nations for the rights of small nations, on the other hand made a large part of the world safe for Soviet-inspired or Chinese-inspired communism. And yet without this, in some ways unholy, alliance between Western democracy and Soviet communism, the Axis would not have been defeated within that time frame. The British and the Americans probably could have eventually defeated the Axis, but it would have taken a lot longer and it would have come at a much higher price.

Are there any meetings where you would have loved to have been a multilingual fly on the wall?

Almost all of them! But I think maybe the Tehran conference was the most fascinating: the first time the Big Three met together. And this is the pivot: it's in the middle of the war, November 1943. This is after the Battle of Stalingrad. The Soviets are flexing their muscles, feeling their power, and the Americans are moving away from the British, Roosevelt is moving away from Churchill towards Stalin, and he uses Churchill as a foil, as a way to curry favour with Stalin by flaunting his differences with the British prime minister.

It seems very pertinent to the current situation. 

I began working on the book in 2019 and to my slight embarrassment it's taken me longer to produce the book then the events that it describes: I've been working on it for longer than the Second World War. And sometimes when you embark on a project it seems purely academic and to have little relevance to the modern world. But this one, for better or more alarming reasons, seems to be extremely relevant.

If you could pull up a list of simple dos and don'ts that you would give to politicians today, what would they be?

The first one would be don't neglect your allies. Allies can be absolutely infuriating. I've written a whole book about Allied infighting, but there's only one thing worse than fighting with allies, as Winston Churchill liked to say, and that is fighting without them. So don't neglect your allies. The second thing is, don't allow yourself to fall into the trap, which so many world leaders have done since summit diplomacy became a method of conducting international relations, and believe that your own personal charm, your own personal diplomacy, your own personal relations with allied leaders can trump deep seated national interests, ideologies and agendas. I think Neville Chamberlain fell into this trap, but so also did Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in the Second World War. And finally, which links to the idea that most of the major diplomatic and political errors of the 1930s and 1940s came about because the participants did not understand each other, and I think that's absolutely crucial: if you're trying to be successful in foreign relations, you must have a true, unvarnished understanding of what your interlocutor or potential adversary is about, what the nature of their regime is and what their aims are.

Is that possible these days? Have we lost the art of debate?

I don't think we've lost the art of debate. I think we've often lost the art of clear-sighted, realistic analysis of what it is that certain states are trying to do, and often it's not that complicated. If we were to take Vladimir Putin, he has been extremely frank about what his global aims are and what his worldview is, and he has supported this ideology and worldview with his actions, well before 2014. It's us in the West who have taken a long time to wake up to his agenda, rather than him failing to make his agenda clear.

What do you think future historians will make of the politics and diplomacy of the last 30 years?

I think historians will look at the West and think 'You had everything, and what an almighty mess you made of it. You, through your greed, allowed deregulation to lead to the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, one that then had myriad and almost wholly undesirable political ramifications across the Western world. You allowed your hubris of your Cold War victory to intervene disastrously in Iraq in 2003, which had equally disastrous ramifications. You preached democracy in the Middle East while showing an appalling lack of compassion for atrocities occurring both in Syria and in Gaza. And then you allowed Vladimir Putin to get to a stage where he could invade an independent, sovereign European country and only belatedly try to do something about it.'

Quite damning then, really?

I don't think it's a record to be proud of.

Can you think of any time or place, anywhere in history that you would like to visit?

I would have liked to have known what the Kremlin was thinking in 1938 when the British and the French were selling out Czechoslovakia – exactly what Stalin's discussions were about the German threat. And I would like to have also been in the Kremlin at various moments in 1941 and 1942, when the war was going very badly on the Eastern Front, and to know exactly how close Stalin came to contemplating a compromise peace with the Germans.

Do you think he came close?

I think there were feelers put out via the Bulgarians. I don't think he came very close.

If you were to throw a dinner party for anyone in history, who would you invite as guests?

I would invite Lord Byron. I would invite Mozart. It would be quite a cultural evening.

Quite a boozy one as well, I imagine.

Yes, it could be quite boozy. Let's stick with the bibulous theme. Churchill should come. Queen Elizabeth I would be interesting, and Jane Austen. I'd happily have Mary Shelley as well.

Tim Bouverie's new book, Allies at War, can be purchased here.