Tom Holland

And you have vast lanes with no traffic lights, no way of crossing it.

The whole infrastructure is...

It's buckling at the seams.

The seams buckle, you know what I mean.

And I guess that this is a legacy of the kind of the great boom in the 60s and 70s.

It absolutely does.

And of course, people will think of Iran as an Islamic country, which it completely is.

But just to emphasise on the ancient roots of the dynamic

in Iran in this episode.

I mean, it is incredibly ancient.

So Farsi, the predominant language in Iran, is descended from the language spoken by the first great rulers of Persia, Cyrus and Darius the Great and people like that.

And that framework of a monarchy and a priesthood, which you see in 20th century Iran and which is so fundamental to the dynamics of the Iranian revolution.

I mean that ultimately reaches back before the coming of Islam all the way back again to the time of Cyrus and Darius.

And the concept of monarchy is at least as fundamental to the historical makeup of Iran as the idea of a kind of a clerisy.

So the great epic of Iran, Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, I mean, it's literally the book of kings.

So when the Shah stands up there, he is, I think, correctly conscious of himself as the heir of thousands of years of rule by monarchs.

Yeah, and he loves very expensive French food, doesn't he?

This kind of meddling by the British in Iranian politics is such a feature of 19th and early 20th century history, isn't it?

That even now in the 21st century, the Iranians are still prone to thinking that Britain lurks behind everything wrong.

So Cyrus is the founder of the Persian monarchy.