Dan Jones
speaker
338 appearances
6 recordings
5 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard 1 Jul
Dan Jones’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Henry sort of puts his arm around his shoulder as he's being led off to a quarter of a century of captivity in England and says to him, look, it's nothing personal. He says, and Henry says, you know, I am just God's scourge. I'm just a vessel for God's work. God wants this to happen. You French are decadent. He sent me to punish you. You've got to understand this.
And when there are public triumphs to celebrate Henry's victories, it's the same thing. He's like, it's not about me. Don't celebrate me. only recognize that I am a vehicle, a vessel, the tool, the rod of God's will, and it's being executed through me. Now, that is an unusually, if you come across somebody with that psychology, they tend to be very hard to put off their track.
God wants me to do it. It's fixity. It's a certainty with which he operates. And it makes, I think for Henry, it makes a lot of this decision, political decision-making really easy because there's not much vacillation. There's like, I know what I'm here to do and I'm going to do it. So, um,
That's, yeah, but it is very unusual because human beings, which is what we're talking about, are very often conflicted and flawed and pulled in many directions by many different motivations. And it's rare to find somebody possessed of such extraordinary discipline. Discipline is one of the things that humans struggle most with. It's the basis of the Jocko Willick podcast.
I mean, you know, we all really struggle to do the thing. But Henry is a guy who does the thing.
Oh, yeah. Oftentimes I found it does sound a lot like Jocko. There's two occasions spring to mind. There are lots of different reports of what Henry says before the Battle of Agincourt, how to rouse his troops. Probably he says a bunch of different things because you can't address the whole army in one go. Then we have Shakespeare, you know, the Great St. Crispin's Day speech.
The one that sounds most like Henry, if you read the other things that he dictated in his own words, is an account from a London Chronicle which says all he said before the Battle of Agincourt was, fellas, let's go. There's three words. That's the motivational speech. And then there's another occasion, quite similar actually. It's 1419 after the Ciduron.
a horrible, horrible winter siege which has gone on for six months. Henry has starved the inhabitants of Rome into submission.
There have been occasions where the citizens of Rome have chucked out useless mouths, quote unquote, women, children, the elderly, people who can't fight but are consuming food and resources, throwing them out of the city, but the English won't allow them through the siege lines, so they're starving in the ditch, the moat, let's say, the dry ditch that surrounds the city of Rome.
And when the citizens of Rouen decide that they're going to capitulate, they're going to give up, they send messengers to Henry to negotiate peace. And top of their list of sort of immediate things they want to this peace deal is soccer, is help for the starving people in the ditch around Rouen.
They say, first, before we do anything else, please, like humanitarian aid, get some help to these poor people starving in the ditch. And Henry just looks at them and says, fellas, who put them there? This is on you. Don't come to me with your whiny bullshit. So he has this cast iron determination. And sometimes there's no sugarcoating. It's absolutely brutal.
But he's always coming back to discipline, focus, purpose, execute on what you say you're going to do.
which worked which ended up working despite it scared me a little bit on like the first couple pages yeah well i didn't tell my editors i was doing it until i just handed the book in and uh because i knew they'd say don't approach the book in this particular way it's gonna fit i just had this deep instinct that this was the way to tell the story and that there was a way to i mean henry is an a cold character he can and he can be hard to create empathy with but i just had this sense of
i'd come up with a way of telling this historical story that wouldn't throw the chronology out of shape that would just keep that would like launch you into the story and just keep you there like from start to finish and listen this is like the 15th book i've written and this is for me like a lot of the business of history communication whether it's you know podcasts like this or on television or whatever it might be on the page is
let's take this material from the past, which is so full of not of entertainment, but also of lessons that we can sort of meditate on the world today. And let's make it feel as exciting as the best HBO kind of series or Netflix show or whatever it is. That's my kind of calling. And it gives me great satisfaction, not only to do it, but to hear readers like yourself appreciating it.
So thank you for that.
We know a lot of information. about the rack panelling in the Harlequin. There's complexities around the plant and equipment in which some of that rack supports the roof covering also the atrium as well. The issue partly is because it's very difficult to inspect every single panel given the size and nature of the building.
And secondly, obviously the complexities around the ownership and responsibilities and that's what we're working towards at the moment is securing that intrusive survey, which will take us to the next level. But it's not that we don't know the extent of the rack or the extent of the issue. It's defining that with the actual head leaseholder.
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