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historian, travel writer and television personality. He is the author of histories of Norman Sicily, the Republic of Venice, the Byzantine Empire and 'The Popes: A History'. [Listener: Christopher Sykes] TRANSCRIPT: Then, when I was a very small child, I went to Miss Betty's kindergarten in the middle of Regent's Park from which I graduated in 1936 to Egerton House, number 20 Dorset Square, in the North-West corner of the square. The building's still there. And where I... it was perfectly ordinary; not, I think, particularly distinguished, but of its kind, of its day, a perfectly good little prep school. And I stayed there until the war broke out and then the whole school was evacuated en masse to join a boarding school in Northamptonshire, Westbury Manor, where we were to stay for the war. And that was rather exciting, I rather loved that because Egerton House had been a fairly poky little place and this at least had space and it even had a swimming pool, unheated of course, full of dead leaves but at least it was a swimming pool. And that is where I was when the war broke out, but I have to go back a little bit because... and tell you about the other things that my mother did for me.