Travels Through Time
249 episodes - English - Latest episode: 7 months ago - ★★★★★ - 73 ratingsIn each episode we ask a leading historian, novelist or public figure the tantalising question, ”If you could travel back through time, which year would you visit?” Once they have made their choice, then they guide us through that year in three telling scenes. We have visited Pompeii in 79AD, Jerusalem in 1187, the Tower of London in 1483, Colonial America in 1776, 10 Downing Street in 1940 and the Moon in 1969. Featured in the Guardian, Times and Evening Standard. Presented weekly by Sunday Times bestselling writer Peter Moore, award-winning historian Violet Moller and Artemis Irvine.
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Episodes
S.C. Gwynne: R101 – The World’s Largest Flying Machine (1930)
October 31, 2023 10:15 - 1 hour - 48.7 MBAfter a short break at TTT, enter the world’s largest flying machine. ‘R101’ was one of the most ambitious creations of the airship era. Plans for it began about a century ago in the 1920s. The vision of engineers and politicians was that the 1930s were to mark the start of a new epoch in air travel. R101 was to lead the way. Huge airships were going to glide through the imperial skies, binding together the distant outposts of the British Empire. In 1930 R101’s story reached its tragic cl...
Peter Moore: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
July 19, 2023 16:10 - 53 minutes - 73.3 MBJoin Peter Moore and Sarah Bakewell for a little walking tour of Fleet Street in London. Instead of three scenes, in this episode they stop off at three locations, as Peter tells Sarah about three of the characters who appear in his new book: the printer William Strahan, the writer Samuel Johnson and the politician John Wilkes. Peter Moore is a Sunday Times bestselling historian. His new book is Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream. Sarah Bakewell is a ...
[From the archive] Philip Hoare: Albert and the Whale (1520)
July 13, 2023 13:36 - 48 minutes - 67 MBIn 1520 the artist Albrecht Dürer was on the run from the Plague and on the look-out for distraction when he heard that a huge whale had been beached on the coast of Zeeland. So he set off to see the astonishing creature for himself. In this beautifully-evoked episode the award-winning writing Philip Hoare takes us back to those consequential days in 1520. We catch sight of Dürer, the great master of the Northern Renaissance, as he searches for the whale. This, he realises, is his chance to...
[From the archive] Bernard Cornwell: The Battle of Waterloo (1815)
July 05, 2023 11:25 - 1 hour - 21 MBIt's time to revisit our archives. In this episode one of the world’s great historical novelists takes us back to one of the most dramatic and consequential moments in European history. Bernard Cornwell is our guide to the Battle of Waterloo. Waterloo. That single word is enough to conjure up images of Napoleon with his great bicorn hat and the daring emperor’s nemesis, the Duke of Wellington. Over the course of twelve or so hours on a Sunday at the start of summer, these two commanders met...
Lady Hale: The Rights of Women (1925)
June 27, 2023 13:43 - 56 minutes - 77.1 MBOur guest today is one of the greatest of Britons. Lady Hale was, until her retirement three years ago, the President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom – the most senior judge in the country. Peter sat down with Lady Hale at her London home for a conversation about her life, her love of history and memoir Spider Woman. After this she took him back to 1925, a pivotal year for the law and women’s rights. For women, the 1920s were a progressive time. Figures like Eleanor Rathbone and...
[Live] Flora Fraser: Pretty Young Rebel (1746)
June 20, 2023 15:55 - 36 minutes - 49.8 MBIn this special live episode, recorded at the Buckingham Literary Festival last weekend, the award-winning writer Flora Fraser takes us to one of the most remote places in the British Isles to witness the dramatic story of how her namesake Flora Macdonald helped Bonnie Prince Charlie escape after his failed attempt to take the throne from George II. Their adventure is one of the most romantic and romanticised episodes in our history, sighed over and depicted by succeeding generations seduc...
Mike Jay: Psychonauts (1885)
June 13, 2023 04:34 - 1 hour - 55.9 MBIn this episode the cultural historian Mike Jay takes Peter back to the high Victorian Age to see how a pioneering group of scholars and artists experimented with mind altering drugs. Jay labels these characters 'psychonauts'. These were daring, romantic figures like Sigmund Freud who championed cocaine as a stimulant, and William James whose experiments with nitrous oxide brought new insights into human consciousness. Others at this time used drugs more informally. One such person was Rob...
David Veevers: How the World Took On the British Empire (1660)
June 06, 2023 16:58 - 1 hour - 68.5 MBIn this lively episode of Travels Through Time the historian Dr David Veevers takes us to the heart of the seventeenth century to visit three key locations in which the British Empire was being formed, challenged and resisted. First, we head to the Deccan Plateau of the Indian Subcontinent to witness a dramatic stand off between the Mughal and Maratha Empires. It would set off a series of events which would eventually lead to the English East India Company acquiring a colony of its own in ...
Leah Redmond Chang: Renaissance Queens and the Price of Power (1559)
May 30, 2023 09:38 - 1 hour - 49.1 MBThis week we head to the turbulent world of sixteenth century France to meet three fascinating queens whose lives were inextricably linked – Catherine de' Medici, Elisabeth de Valois and Mary Queen of Scots. They are the subject of our guest today, Leah Redmond Chang's, new book, Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power. 'The royal body exists to be looked at,' Hilary Mantel wrote in her essay "Royal Bodies". For a royal woman especially, this has meant that the most int...
Andrew Spira: Botticelli, Perugino and Dürer (1500)
May 26, 2023 10:38 - 1 hour - 89.6 MBThe Renaissance was stirred into life by many figures of genius. In this episode Peter meets up with the art historian, Andrew Spira, to talk about three of the great masters in one of the most captivating of years. In different ways Botticelli, Perugino and Dürer were finding new stories to tell in their paintings. Spira evaluates all of this for us and he detects the emergence of something else that would be of central importance in the emerging Western society. This was a revolutionary n...
Serhii Plokhy: The Collapse of the Soviet Union (1991)
May 23, 2023 11:56 - 51 minutes - 70.1 MBFor this week's episode Peter headed in to Penguin's offices in London to meet Serhii Plokhy and talk to him about his new book, The Russo-Ukrainian War. They discussed how a culture of secrecy continues to define Russian society as it did before with the Soviets. They looked at the progress of the war and Putin's failed attempt to found a 'Eurasian Union'. Following this Serhii revisits the dramatic events of 1991, when he watched on as the Soviet Union collapsed in the most unexpected of ...
[From the archives] Craig Brown: Beatlemania (1963)
May 19, 2023 16:14 - 48 minutes - 50.5 MBIt's time to delve into our archive. In this brilliantly descriptive and entertaining episode, the award-winning writer and satirist Craig Brown takes us on a cultural tour of 1963. We discuss the Great Train Robbery, the Beatles meteoric rise to fame and the assassination of JFK. For much, much more about all this and to be the first to see the amazing new colourised photograph of the Beatles in Washington DC at their first US concert – head to our website. Show Notes: Scene One: August ...
Honor Cargill-Martin: The Notorious Empress Messalina (48 AD)
May 16, 2023 05:00 - 59 minutes - 51.7 MBIn this episode of Travels Through Time the classicist Honor Cargill-Martin takes Artemis on a tour of the debauched and dangerous world of Roman politics. We meet Messalina, one of the Rome's most notorious women, and follow her through the events of 48 AD that would lead to her eventual downfall and execution. For over two thousand years Messalina has been characterised as the scheming and sexually rapacious wife of Emperor Claudius. In one famous story she attends a brothel to take part ...
Tom Whipple: The Battle of the Beams (1940)
May 09, 2023 12:27 - 58 minutes - 49.6 MBToday Tom Whipple, science editor of The Times, takes us back to a critical moment at the beginning of World War Two. Just a month after replacing Neville Chamberlain as prime minister, Winston Churchill learned that the Nazis were using beams to direct their bombers towards targets in Britain’s industrial heartlands. The science behind these beams was so pioneering that it was difficult to believe that it was true. But, as Churchill learned at a dramatic meeting in Whitehall in June 1940...
Simon Winchester: Knowing What We Know (1924)
May 02, 2023 15:42 - 1 hour - 40.7 MBIt has been said that the past is another country, but the events we discuss in this episode feel all too familiar. Media interference in elections, Russian influence on Western politics, controversial immigration policy and the technology industry are all as close to the top of the agenda today as there were in 1924. Today Violet is joined on a tour back to 1924 by the celebrated writer Simon Winchester. Simon is one of the great literary figures of his generation. His career as a journali...
Rebecca Struthers: Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots and Watchmaking History (1572)
April 28, 2023 15:51 - 58 minutes - 33.7 MBEngland in the mid sixteenth century was filled with drama and novelty. As conspiracies played out and a new queen sought to established herself on the throne, a glamorous new technology was emerging in the fashionable world. In this fascinating episode, Rebecca Struthers, the author of Hands of Time: A Watchmaker’s History of Time, takes us back to the high Elizabethan Age to tell us all about the early days of watchmaking. The stories that feature in this episode are covered in much more...
Luke Turner: Men at War (1943)
April 25, 2023 21:33 - 57 minutes - 54.2 MBIn today’s beautifully described episode the author and journalist Luke Turner takes us back to 1943 to present us with a refreshingly different view of World War 2. The war, Turner reminds us, was a cultural experience as well as a military contest. One feature of this cultural environment has been largely neglected by generations of scholars. This is the unusual degree of freedom some members of the British armed forces had to explore issues of sexuality and gender. The stories that feat...
Amy Jeffs: Tales from Medieval England (1327)
April 21, 2023 15:43 - 48 minutes - 52.2 MBThis week we have an extra Friday episode for you. It’s with the multi-talented artist, historian and musician Dr Amy Jeffs. She takes us back to 1327, a year of high political drama when King Edward II of England was deposed by his wife, Isabella, and his teenage son, Edward III was crowned and began his fifty-year reign. Jeffs spent her university years deep in the Middle Ages, studying palaeography, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse and Middle Welsh, alongside more traditional art history courses. ...
Nicholas Orme: A Year of Great Promise (1480)
April 18, 2023 04:22 - 53 minutes - 39.4 MBIn the last decades of the fifteenth century, life in England was finally starting to settle down after years of upheaval and conflict during the Wars of the Roses which had riven society since the mid 1450s. Waves of Plague had decimated the population, causing widespread distress but providing unexpected opportunities for those who survived. The cultural and political landscape were ripe for change. This week’s guest, the distinguished historian Nicholas Orme, takes us back to this time...
[From the archives] Jane Rogoyska: The Katyń Massacre (1940)
April 14, 2023 13:39 - 57 minutes - 53.9 MBThis month marks 80 years since the government of Nazi Germany announced the shocking discovery of a series of mass graves in the Katyń Forest in the occupied USSR. Thus began one of the most tangled and disturbing of WW2 stories. Just what had happened? In this episode from our archive, the writer Jane Rogoyska, author of Surviving Katyń, takes us back to the year 1940 to find out. *** In April 1943 the discovery of a series of mass graves in the Katyń Forest near Smolensk in the Soviet ...
John Darlington: The Port Royal Earthquake (1692)
April 11, 2023 05:35 - 50 minutes - 65.2 MBToday the archaeologist and executive director of World Monuments Fund, John Darlington, takes us on a dramatic trip back to the 1690s to witness a devastating earthquake in the Caribbean. Scroll down, too, for news of a special discount code. *** After its capture by the English in 1655, Port Royal, Jamaica, became a place of great significance. Home to around 6,500 people by the 1690s, it was known variously as 'the fairest town of all the English plantations' and the ‘richest and wicked...
Katja Hoyer: Beyond The Wall (1973)
April 04, 2023 04:09 - 56 minutes - 49.4 MB‘I have so often wondered’, the historian Katja Hoyer says, ‘what I would have made of the state that I was born into had I been born a few years earlier and lived through it in the way that other people did.’ That state was East Germany or the German Democratic Republic (GDR). This was a nation that emerged out of the ashes of World War II and existed until the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1990. The GDR is remembered today in the West as a neurotic, oppressive nation, synonymous with it...
Company of Heroes 3: David Milne (1942-4)
March 28, 2023 04:28 - 1 hour - 79.9 MBIn this episode we talk to the game designer David Milne about his historical work on the hugely popular real time strategy game Company of Heroes 3. Milne takes us back to the Mediterranean theatre of World War II, from Tobruk in North Africa to Anzio in Italy, as we learn how games developers faithfully evoke the past. Company of Heroes 3 is the latest instalment in the multi-million selling Company of Heroes franchise. Developed by Relic Entertainment in Vancouver, the game has been enth...
Sarah Bakewell: Petrarch and Boccaccio (1348*)
March 21, 2023 05:59 - 1 hour - 48.7 MBToday the bestselling and prize-winning author Sarah Bakewell takes us back to the mid-fourteenth century. This was a time of great hardship when politics was violently fractured and when the plague was ripping across Europe. But at this singular moment in Western history two figures of genius, Petrarch and Boccaccio, started their pioneering literary work. In doing so they became, as Bakewell explains, ‘the first of the great literary humanists’. This is the starting point of Sarah Bakewel...
Nandini Das: The first English embassy to India (1616)
March 14, 2023 05:58 - 1 hour - 57.9 MBThe relationship between England and India is a deep and complex one. In this episode the academic and author of Courting India, Nandini Das, takes us back to a significant moment at the very beginning of this relationship. She tells us all about Sir Thomas Roe, the courtier who led the first English embassy to India. Roe's mission was an exciting and a daunting one. Stories about the riches of India had long been exchanged in England and, when he stepped ashore in Surat in 1615, he was abl...
[From the archives] Ariana Neumann: When Time Stopped (1944)
March 10, 2023 20:28 - 58 minutes - 48.2 MBIn this deeply moving episode from 2020 the New York Times bestselling author Ariana Neuman told her father's extraordinary story for the very first time. Hans Neumann was a young Jewish man from Prague who managed to outwit the Nazis and survive the Holocaust. Ariana Neumann grew up in the Venezuela of the 1970s and 1980s. This was a land of possibility and progress. Her father Hans Neumann - a hugely successful industrialist and patron of the arts – epitomised both these characteristics. ...
Nicholas Spencer: The Great Debate (1860)
March 07, 2023 05:17 - 54 minutes - 57.3 MBThis week we tackle the fascinating and complex relationship between science and religion, in the company of the academic and writer Nicholas Spencer. Spencer takes us back to a dramatic moment of conflict that began at the end of the 1850s with the publication of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of the Species. This book ignited a fierce debate about his new theory of natural selection and of humanity’s place in the world. The feud would become increasingly bitter over the year that follow...
Christopher Hadley: Roman Roads and the Invasion of Britain (51 AD)
February 28, 2023 05:59 - 55 minutes - 73.9 MBNothing symbolises the might of imperial Rome like their roads. Expertly engineered and perfectly cambered, they were the arteries of the great empire through which merchants, armies and information flowed. In this episode we will follow one of those lost roads back in time to the very beginning of the Roman occupation of Britain, in the company of the writer Christopher Hadley. He takes us back to 51 AD, a turning point in the invasion, when Caratacus, King of the Catuvellauni Tribe and le...
Don Hollway: The Year of Three Battles (1066)
February 21, 2023 05:59 - 1 hour - 56.9 MB1066 was the year that England’s destiny was decided. In this superbly analysed episode, the author Don Hollway takes us back to the scenes of the three great battles that changed the course of history: Fulford, Stamford Bridge and Hastings. *** The drama of 1066 began in its very first week, with the death of the old king, Edward the Confessor, on 5 January. The following day the powerful earl Harold Godwinson was crowned in Westminster Abbey and the dynamic was set for the clash that fol...
[From the archives] Rebecca Wragg Sykes: Neanderthals (Eemian)
February 19, 2023 17:32 - 52 minutes - 71.9 MBHere is another gem from our archive. In this fascinating episode the archaeologist and writer Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes takes us back further than we’ve ever been before, 125,000 years, to meet our extinct kindred: the Neanderthals. We visit the vibrant wild woodlands of Britain, a hornbeam forest on the European continent and a German lakeshore. Rebecca describes the world as it was in the interglacial age known as the Eemian and tell us how the Neanderthals lived, worked and loved in this w...
James Hall: Michelangelo and Leonardo in Florence (1504)
February 14, 2023 05:08 - 54 minutes - 75.4 MBIn the early sixteenth century, some of the world’s most famous works of art were being created, many of them in Florence and Rome. In this episode, the acclaimed art historian James Hall takes us back to 1504, just as Michelangelo was finishing his monumental statue of David, the first of its size in the modern era. His great rival, Leonardo da Vinci, also in Florence at this time, was on the committee to decide where the statue should be placed. The original idea of hoisting it hundreds o...
Tania Branigan: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (1966)
February 07, 2023 05:33 - 1 hour - 57.2 MBIn this episode the Guardian journalist Tania Branigan takes us back to the opening phases of the ‘Cultural Revolution’, Mao Zedong’s attempt to purge Chinese society of its impurities. Over the course of a few fraught months in the summer of 1966, the transformational movement that would last for an anguished decade, began. *** In Britain 1966 is remembered as a glittering time. It was the year of the World Cup, of Pet Sounds, Revolver and Andy Warhol. But as Western culture flowered, f...
Marion Turner: The Wife of Bath (1397)
January 31, 2023 05:47 - 54 minutes - 78.9 MBIt is difficult to hear the stories of medieval women, but one voice rings down the ages, clear as a bell. Alison, the Wife of Bath, is Geoffrey Chaucer’s most famous creation: irrepressible, hilarious, insightful. She is the star of The Canterbury Tales with her outrageous stories and touching honesty. An inspiration for a huge range of writers – from William Shakespeare to Margaret Atwood and Zadie Smith – she is the sparkling subject at the heart of Marion Turner’s new book, The Wife of ...
John Sellars: Aristotle (347 BC)
January 24, 2023 06:19 - 1 hour - 85.3 MBThis week we’re heading back to the fourth century BC to take a look at one of the world’s greatest ever philosophers. Indeed, according to today’s guest, John Sellars, Aristotle may be even more than that. He might well be the single most important human ever to have lived. Aristotle’s philosophical work transformed the people thought about the world around them. During his magnificent career he laid the foundation for science; he pioneered new methods for understanding drama and literatur...
Simon Akam: The Changing of the Guard (2006)
January 17, 2023 22:26 - 58 minutes - 80.9 MBThe British Army can trace its origins back to the Acts of Union of 1707 and its rich history involves conflicts both large and small in all corners of the globe. But as the twenty-first century dawned, the organisation found itself in a transitional phase and with something of an identity crisis. What exactly was its culture? What, with its resources, could it really be expected to achieve? What was its relevance to modern Britain? Today’s guest, Simon Akam, sought to confront questions ...
[From the archives] Diarmaid MacCulloch: Thomas Cromwell (1536)
January 10, 2023 23:02 - 55 minutes - 46.8 MBIt’s midwinter, we’re midway through our sixth season and we thought it was time to revisit a favourite old episode. Today we have for you a recording made at Buxton Literary Festival in 2019. It is with the Oxford professor and prize-winning historian Diarmaid MacCulloch. Our destination is the year 1536 and our subject is one of the most complex and fascinating in English political history: Thomas Cromwell. == Thomas Cromwell, a self-described “ruffian”, was King Henry VIII’s chief minis...
Tim Clayton: James Gillray and a Revolution in Satire (1792)
January 03, 2023 05:48 - 56 minutes - 51.4 MBAs today’s guest Tim Clayton explains, 'the late eighteenth-century mixed the extremely crude with the extremely fine in a fascinating sort of way.’ The grand master of this potent concoction was the greatest political caricaturist of modern times: James Gillray. Gillray worked in raucous, restless times. He began in the wake of the American War of Independence and, having charted each twist and turn of the French Revolution, he died a short time before the Battle of Waterloo. In this time...
Harry Sidebottom: The Mad Emperor (218)
December 27, 2022 17:16 - 1 hour - 57.2 MBWe have our fair share of bizarre rulers in the twenty-first century, but the subject of today’s episode makes Putin, Trump and Kim Jong Il seem rather tame. According to the Oxford academic and bestselling novelist Harry Sidebottom, our guide this week, the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus was the maddest and baddest of them all. Heliogabalus turned Rome upside down as he rampaged over political and religious tradition during his lust-fuelled, four-year reign, contributing to the instability and...
Josiah Osgood: Caesar, Cato and the Fall of the Roman Republic (46BC)
December 20, 2022 06:13 - 56 minutes - 50.8 MBThe rivalry between Julius Caesar and Cato the Younger is one of the most intense in political history. Both were high-ranking figures of great gifts, but their personal feud was a powerful factor in the downfall of the Roman Republic. Joining us in this episode to tell us more about Cato and Caesar’s contrasting characters and the dramatic historical events they lived through is the award-winning author and Professor of Classics at Georgetown University, Josiah Osgood. Osgood takes us bac...
Philip Mansel: Louis XIV, The Sun King (1700)
December 13, 2022 11:37 - 58 minutes - 63.3 MBIn this episode Philip Mansel takes us inside the court of King Louis XIV at Versailles, probably the most lavish, extraordinary royal palace ever built. Versailles was a place where the fun never stopped. There were parties, plays, banquets, firework displays and concerts. Life at court was a giddy carousel of extravagance, culture, beauty, wit, sophistication and intrigue. As the decorated historian Philip Mansel tells us in this sparkling episode, Versailles was the centre of power, pol...
Paul Hayward: The World Cup (1966)
December 09, 2022 08:12 - 52 minutes - 71.7 MBAs the English football team prepare for one of the most important games in their recent history at the Qatar World Cup, one of the nation’s finest sports writers takes us back to the year Gareth Southgate’s players are trying to emulate: 1966. *** England’s performance in the first World Cups was underwhelming. For a nation that prided themselves on having invented the game, on successive occasions in the 1950s and early 1960s the English players were left to watch as West Germany and Bra...
[Special] The Grigoryan Brothers: Australia
December 05, 2022 22:52 - 58 minutes - 134 MBIn this special episode the multi-award winning guitarists Slava and Leonard Grigoryan take us back into Australian history in three enchanting pieces of music. Each track features on their acclaimed album, This Is Us, which arose out of a collaborative project with the National Museum of Australia. *** Over the past two decades the Grigoryan Brothers have established themselves as among the finest Australian musicians of their generation. Several years ago, following a chance meeting at a...
Elizabeth Wilson: Playing with Fire (1921)
November 29, 2022 09:40 - 55 minutes - 126 MBThis week, the performer and author Elizabeth Wilson speaks to Artemis from the offices of Yale University Press in Bedford Square. Elizabeth tells us about the early life of a remarkable pianist, Maria Yudina, who rose to fame in Stalin’s Russia. Maria Yudina was born in 1899 to a Jewish family in Nevel, a small town which now sits close to Russia’s border with Belarus. Legend has it that Maria was Stalin’s favourite pianist. Those who have seen Armando Iannucci’s satirical film The Death ...
Murray Pittock: Scotland Reborn (1967)
November 22, 2022 05:49 - 49 minutes - 34.4 MBOn 2 November 1967 Winnie Ewing shocked the political establishment when she won the Scottish seat of Hamilton for the Scottish National Party. As today’s guest, Professor Murray Pittock explains, so began a month that would radically re-shape modern British politics. *** For British politics the 1960s was a testing time. While the country experienced its fabled cultural flowering, it simultaneously had to come to terms with its reduced place in the world. Decolonisation was going ahead at...
Jane Draycott: Antony and Cleopatra (31/30 BCE)
November 15, 2022 06:00 - 58 minutes - 39.3 MBThis week the Roman historian and archaeologist Jane Draycott takes us to meet one of history’s most glamorous and infamous couples, Antony and Cleopatra. We join them in a crucial year in the history of Ancient Rome, around 31/30 BCE, when the Roman republic fell away and Octavian – later Emperor Augustus – seized power and founded the Roman Empire, with disastrous consequences for Antony, Cleopatra and their children. This dramatic piece of history forms the origin story of Cleopatra Se...
James Holland: D-Day with the Sherwood Rangers (1944)
November 10, 2022 06:33 - 56 minutes - 41 MBThis Remembrance Week the best-selling historian James Holland takes us back to a crucial year in the Second World War. We travel to Gold Beach on D-Day and then into the country lanes of Normandy on the trail of the Sherwood Rangers. * On the damp and blustery morning of 6 June 1944 the Sherwood Rangers fought their way onto Gold Beach. An armoured regiment, filled with Sherman tanks, the Sherwood Rangers had already had an exhausting war. From Palestine to North Africa, the young men in ...
Giles Milton: Yalta and the Race for Berlin (1945)
November 03, 2022 20:46 - 59 minutes - 136 MBAs 1945 began the greatest conflict in human history was drawing to a close. But with the war in the west almost over, a new question was increasingly being asked. It was one to which Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt all had different answers. What was going to happen next? In this episode the million-copy bestselling author Giles Milton takes us back to some key moments in 1945. At Yalta on the Crimean peninsula and later in the ruins of Berlin, the shape of the po...
Emma J Wells: Heaven on Earth (1220)
October 25, 2022 05:00 - 56 minutes - 130 MBWalking around a cathedral today can be a solemn and an awe-inspiring experience, but what if we could stand inside the same building and travel back 800 years or so? In this episode we do exactly that. Our guide is Dr Emma J. Wells, a historian, broadcaster and author of Heaven on Earth: The Lives and Legacies of the World’s Greatest Cathedrals. In this beautifully illustrated book, Emma visits sixteen world-renowned cathedrals ranging from Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, to the “northern power...
Revolutionary Russia: Orlando Figes (1917)
October 18, 2022 14:02 - 1 hour - 47.1 MBIn the final sentence of A People’s Tragedy, his multi-award winning study of the Russian Revolution, Orlando Figes wrote ominously that, ‘the ghosts of 1917 have not been laid to rest.’ This year, as Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has played out, we have been able to glimpse some of these ghosts: fear, paranoia, grievance. All these emotions have arisen out of a long, complicated and contested history that Figes has attempted to explain for a Western readership in his i...
Lucy Wooding: Tudor England (1558)
October 11, 2022 17:46 - 51 minutes - 34.7 MBHaving watched the second Elizabethan era draw to a close in recent weeks, it is fitting that in this episode we are going back to the beginning of the first Elizabethan era – the moment when Mary Tudor died leaving the throne to her younger half-sister. These two queens, the first women to rule England in their own right, were divided by their faith. The greatest challenge facing Elizabeth on her accession was to unite a country which was polarised by religion, having passed from hard-line...