terrible damage, being a puritan, he wrecked all our--our beautiful churches, 'cause he ripped away all the iconography and graven images and replaced them with the giant thermometers that you can still see to this day..." "So how many British people died in the Civil War, then?" "Eight-five thousand on the battlefield." "[winces]" "Er, another hundred thousand dying of their wounds afterwards." "The people who really suffered were the Irish, of whom it's estimated half the population were decimated by the great Cromwell. [laughs] And it's an example a friend told me, who works at the Foreign Office, that, er, that, er, dear Robin Cook, when he..." "When the Labour Party came to power, and they were going, "We're going to be all ethical and we're going tobe all good"..." "They took down some picture in the Foreign Office of a Nepalese prince, 'cause they thought it was all Imperialist, which deeply offended the Nepalese government, and they put up, er, this big portrait of Cromwell, you know, Republican, you know, sort of Lefty figure-- [laughs]" "and the first meeting they had was with the Irish government, who took one look... !" "And it was..." "It was like showing Eichmann to the... to the Israeli ambassador!" "In the seven years between 1642 and 1649, in the period known as the English Civil War, a staggering one in ten of the adult male population died, more than three times the proportion that died in the First World War and more than five times the proportion that