Mark Sutton

And I certainly found teaching equal parts enjoyable and incredibly stressful.

And there's a long description of what Tom went through in his first semester, which I thought was almost too true to my experience.

Hey, it's great to be back.

But you know the saddest thing about that is there's actually a line in my PhD where I talk about the likelihood of him ever winning the Nobel or receiving the Nobel because he was a perennial nominee and I opined in my PhD that he was unlikely to ever get the Nobel Prize and boy was my face red.

Also a Nobel laureate because, of course, you were listening there and in between you were saying something about her... Oh, well, it was interesting that Allende writes about her relative who, because he is a historical figure and, as you said, she couldn't really avoid writing about him.

She's writing his period history and I think Tolstoy has the same problem with Count Tolstoy in War and Peace where...

He's an important figure in some of the battles Tolstoy is describing and he has to have this kind of almost dispassionate way of talking about him, even though they are a lineage.

So it's a problem that's occurred before.

Indeed.

I read a few interesting things over summer as, you know, it's the time of year when I get to read the most.

Probably the thing that stayed with me the most was a book called Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, which was – he was a New Yorker writer and he's written this book which is about the troubles in Northern Ireland –

It's non-fiction, but it's very focused on characters rather than just telling the history.

And it actually reads with this kind of breakneck pace like a novel.

It's the biggest page turner I read all year, which is a strange thing to say about a non-fiction book.

But one of the most interesting things about it is...

It starts, and it does do the history of the troubles, but it goes right up to the present day and looks at the trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder that many of the people involved in the troubles experienced later in life.

And there's a really interesting idea in it called moral injury.

which is basically the idea that for these individuals, especially those from the provisional IRA who did these things, committed murders, torture, bombs, the whole bit, they could often justify it to themselves, you know, because it was in support of a united Ireland and they believed in the cause and therefore...

did not feel the moral weight of having done these things.

And then when the Good Friday Agreement happened and the troubles came to an end without a united Ireland, suddenly it was like the rug had been pulled out from under them and they no longer could justify to themselves the things they'd done because it hadn't led to the...