Neil Oliver is not a historian. On that point he is very clear. The presenter of Coast, A History of Scotland and Vikings studied archaeology at the University of Glasgow “a thousand years ago” but is adamant that this qualification does not make him an expert in history or an academic.

“I’m a generalist,” he tells the Border Telegraph. “I’ve got the attention span of a gnat.

“To study, to pursue something to PhD level, it involves studying a very, very narrow area for a long time and I’m not interested in doing that.

“I like all of history.”

Oliver is this week’s Borders Book Festival guest, appearing on Sunday (September 20) to talk about his latest book, Wisdom of the Ancients: Life Lessons from our Distant Past, out this month.

As he talks, it becomes clear that he is not just a historian at all – he’s a sociologist, anthropologist, philosopher, entertainer, tutor and author, all rolled into one.

But these multiple skills are built on a foundation of his absolute love of history; a love that began when he was very young.

He says: “When I was a little boy I was always interested in where my family had come from.

“I was always being curious about why we lived where we did; I was mostly brought up in Dumfries and I was interested in how that had happened, given that my grandparents lived in Glasgow and Renfrew. Why were they there?

“And then I found out both my grandfathers had been in the First World War, so that made me interested in that, and then when I found out about the First World War I became interested in how it had happened.

“To me, history was just part of trying to understand my family and the things that had happened to my family.”

Oliver finds the concept of not being interested in history genuinely incredible.

“It’s like saying you’re not interested in the news or something,” he says.

“I can’t process not being interested in history because to me it’s everything.

“If you said to me you’re not interested in history, I’d think, ‘You’re not interested in why the world is the way it is?’

“I can’t process that information.”

To study Oliver’s career is a history project in itself, littered with twists and turns and moments of serendipity.

Having graduated with his degree in archaeology, he worked for three years “digging with an excavator,” he says, “and then after about three years of it, the penny dropped that there was no real career structure in it and it was very poorly paid and it involved being outdoors in all weather.

“Why that hadn’t occurred to me prior to embarking upon it I don’t really know but nonetheless I thought I better change path.”

He then trained as a journalist on local papers in his native Dumfriesshire, before moving to East Lothian for his first qualified position on another local paper there.

But this career path also came to a dead end.

“It was never really something that I had planned to be,” Oliver says. “I knew it wasn’t going to be my life’s work, working in newspapers.”

His next step was into the world of the internet, a concept so new that the website he helped set up – for BT – was only the third website in Britain.

“But that didn’t particularly appeal to me either,” admits Oliver.

Border Telegraph:

It was while taking extended breaks from this job, working with archaeologist friend Tony Pollard on a dig in South Africa, excavating a Victorian battlefield at Isandlwana, that Oliver made his first move into television.

He explains: “We’d go out for a month or six weeks at a time, and a television company came across us, found out what we were doing, thought it sounded interesting – two guys excavating a battlefield – and made it into a television series called Two Men In A Trench.

“I left my job to do that full time and I’ve been dodging about doing telly and books and whatever ever since.”

It was TV show Coast, he says, that led to the public misconception that he is a historian. The team of five presenters were all given an identity – “a bit like the Power Rangers” – and since Oliver’s co-presenter Mark Horton was a professor of archaeology at Bristol University, he had dibs on that label.

So it fell to Oliver to don the badge of the history expert, even though he insists “it’s not my thing”.

Speaking to him, however, it’s clear that history is very much his thing.

He reels off names and dates without pause, linking them through a timeline of places and people to show how everything is connected.

He quotes naturalist John Muir, who said: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

Oliver says: “That applies to history, for me.

“If you try to pick at any event, however small, once you pick at it a little bit you find it’s connected to everything else that’s ever happened.”

In this way, Oliver says, there are themes that come out of the history of humankind, and it’s these themes he touches on in Wisdom of the Ancients.

Though he wrote it before coronavirus and the ensuing lockdown, the book offers people ancient wisdom to get them through troubled times. It is, says Oliver, “incredibly prescient”.

“I was aware, like many people are, that there’s a lot of unhappiness around, in the West, a lot of anger about things like Brexit, Scottish independence and climate change,” says the writer, “and I was in the habit of, in order to calm myself down and feel a bit better, thinking about older things.

“People have been through climate change, natural disasters, rising sea levels, pandemics, Black Death, invasion and war, so reading about how they had coped with situations in the past I always find quite reassuring; to know that people have been going through periods of peace and then periods of tumult and it just comes around in these cycles.”

Oliver disagrees that this cyclical nature of human behaviour means we are not learning from historical mistakes.

“We are, we are,” he says. “Because otherwise things wouldn’t get better.

“It’s worth remembering that we’re on a trajectory from much worse to where we are now.

“If there’s any place and time in the past on this planet that you would rather go back to, I’d be impressed.

“Modern medicine, painkillers, dentistry, everything that we’ve got in the West… we have been on a trajectory to better times, so clearly we have been learning a lot because we’ve got the miracle of the 21st century.”

It seems that, for this historian, there’s no time like the present.

To see Neil Oliver in conversation with Alistair Moffat, go to bordersbookfestival.org/online-event/neil-oliver/

The Borders Book Festival is sponsored by Baillie Gifford.