Harrison Ford

They were running candidates in special elections on a peace platform.

They thought the war was a terrible misunderstanding of Hitler's good intentions and that it was probably caused by evil Jewish plutocrats, of course.

And they were there offering...

what seemed to them and to defeated and disheartened people beyond the actual fascist organisation as the future, the inevitable thing that would happen when Europe went fascist.

And I give Iris a sense of visceral horror, which I think is completely deserved, watching these people with their big sign saying fascism is practical patriotism and fascism for king and empire and peace now.

active at the very moment where a fascist army are kind of rolling westwards and look very much as if they're going to conquer Britain too.

It is local evil to go with global evil.

Yes, I did become very aware the moment of this book was

aligns itself, overlaps with the moment we're having now and that the dangers of that time are kind of a warning about the dangers of this time and that there should be something really sobering about what a close thing it was that the world...

did in the end decide to resist fascism, that there was just the right balance of opinion in Britain to just push it over to going, actually, stuff the British Empire.

This is too important.

We'll bankrupt ourselves to fight fascism.

My intentions here are celebratory.

And she is safely dead.

She died at 99 and a half, 15 years ago.

There was a particular moment.

My grandmother was a resilient person who was on the whole hopeless at storytelling about her life.

So you only ever got very small glimpses of what she had done in the past.

And there was a moment at the beginning of this century when she was in her vigorous early 90s when she and I went to the oldest Indian restaurant in England.

And we sat down and she looked around and she said –