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
Damian Dibben: Venice and ‘The Colour Storm’ (1510)
October 06, 2022 15:13 - 43 minutes - 22.1 MBThis week we are off to see some of the Renaissance masters at work with the acclaimed novelist Damian Dibben. * In the early years of the sixteenth century Venice was not only a place of great power it was a site of huge cultural splendour. In particular a new generation of artists were animating the buildings like never before. And unlike many of the other Renaissance painters, the Venetians were not solely obsessed by line and form; they were equally interested in the allure and possibi...
Robert Harris: Act of Oblivion (1660)
September 29, 2022 20:49 - 54 minutes - 31.9 MBWe start our sixth season with Robert Harris, one of Britain's great contemporary novelists. He takes us back to a tremendously important year in English (and world) history. 1660. In England the mid seventeenth century was a dramatic and bloody time. It was a age when important questions about the nature of power were posed and the traditions of monarchy were challenged. In 1649 this led to the execution of King Charles I on a cold January day in Whitehall. Almost a century and a half befo...
Hello Everyone: Season Six of TTT
September 28, 2022 22:59 - 1 minute - 949 KBHello everyone, we're back! Season Six of Travels Through Time begins with an episode with the Number One Bestselling novelist Robert Harris tomorrow. Music: “Love Token” from the album “This Is Us” By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan
Suzanne Fagence Cooper: At Home with Jane and William Morris (1862)
July 12, 2022 05:00 - 58 minutes - 40.8 MBThis week we meet an extraordinary couple, whose life-long partnership and dual creativity changed the face of Britain’s Arts and Crafts movement. If it’s ever been possible to come up with a philosophy for how to live, William Morris came pretty close. He once said that “The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.” It’s a beautiful sentiment and it’s one that makes even more sense when you learn more about his family and the home he cr...
[Live] Oskar Jensen: Vagabonds (1815)
July 05, 2022 22:00 - 58 minutes - 46.4 MBWelcome to a very special live recording of Travels Through Time, made at the Chalke Valley History Festival. Under the sun of a midsummer day in southern England, Violet Moller sat down for a chat, and a song, with a fascinating young historian. Oskar Jensen took Violet back to the year 1815 and introduced her to several characters from his new book, Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth Century London. Oskar Jensen completed a doctorate at Christ Church, Oxford before being award...
Michael Wood: Alfred the Great and the Vikings (878)
June 28, 2022 13:22 - 1 hour - 45.7 MBThis week we are travelling back to the ninth century to witness one of the major turning points in English history. Winston Churchill regularly tops ‘the greatest Briton of all time’ charts, but his own vote for this accolade apparently went to the man we are going to discuss today. Alfred 'the Great' is the only English monarch to enjoy such an admiring epithet. Æthelred, the later monarch, is remembered as ‘the Unready’ (although this meant poorly advised rather than unprepared), Willia...
Ronan McGreevy: The Assassination of Sir Henry Wilson MP (1922)
June 21, 2022 10:20 - 1 hour - 41.8 MBAlmost exactly a century ago, on 22 June 1922, a series of gunshots rang out in Belgravia, London. Out of this polite neighbourhood, home to powerful politicians and wealthy financiers, a shocking news story quickly spread. Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, MP, one of the great heroes of the Great War had been assassinated. Who was responsible, why it mattered, and what happened next is the subject of an incisive, absorbing new book called Great Hatred, by the Irish Times journalist Ronan Mc...
Sam Knight: The Premonitions Bureau (1967)
June 14, 2022 20:58 - 1 hour - 44 MBIn this episode we’re heading to the 1960s to meet a man who tried to uncover the difference between fate and coincidence. Have you ever had a feeling that something would happen before it did? Or seen something you couldn’t make sense of? In 1967 the psychiatrist John Barker set up a bureau in the offices of the London Evening Standard where members of the public could phone in and report their premonitions. A strange dream. A headache and an overwhelming feeling of dread. A vision withou...
Toby Wilkinson; The Discovery of Tutankhamun’s Tomb (1922)
June 09, 2022 15:03 - 59 minutes - 43 MBOn 26 November 1922 Howard Carter gazed into the darkness of a newly-discovered tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Can you see anything? Lord Carnarvon, his companion and sponsor asked him. ‘Yes,’ Carter replied, ‘wonderful things.’ * This year marks the centenary of perhaps the greatest archaeological discovery in history. At the end of 1922, the world was astonished by the news from Thebes in Egypt. After years of searching, a discovery of the most extraordinary nature was made in...
John Goodall: A History of the Castle (1217)
May 31, 2022 05:00 - 42 minutes - 27.1 MBIn this episode we strap on our armour and brace ourselves for battle! From the monumental ruins of strongholds like Conwy and Dover to the fantastical turrets of Hogwarts, castles are an important element in our vision of the past. They played a vital role in history, as centres of defence and political power, the physical foundation of royal and noble authority. This week, we are travelling through time with the acclaimed architectural historian John Goodall. His new book The Castle: A H...
Felipe Fernández-Armesto; The Year Our World Began (1492)
May 24, 2022 04:37 - 59 minutes - 38.7 MB1492 famously brought Columbus’s discovery of a route to America. This was, as today’s guest Felipe Fernández-Armesto points out, ‘a world-changing event if ever there was one.’ But what else was happening in that fateful year? Far beyond the courts of Europe, what was life like in China? In Africa? In this week’s brilliantly insightful episode we set out on a journey of our own to glimpse 1492 in three telling scenes. Our guest is one of the finest imaginable. Felipe Fernández-Armesto is a...
Paul Fischer: Motion Pictures and the Rise of Modern Britain (1888)
May 17, 2022 05:00 - 58 minutes - 22.5 MBIn this episode we head to Victorian Britain, where leaps in technology were making the world seem smaller and faster than ever before. Our guide is the author and film-maker Paul Fischer whose new book, The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures, charts the incredible race to invent the first film camera and projector. The late nineteenth century was a world full of contradictions. Categorically Victorian but also undeniably modern. Technological developments were exhilarating and anxiety-induc...
Dr Suzie Sheehy: The Matter of Everything (1932)
May 10, 2022 05:00 - 1 hour - 47.9 MBIn this episode, we are donning our lab coats and gaining access to the secrets of particle physics. We visit 1932, an astonishing year in the history of science across the world, from Carl Anderson’s rooftop cloud chamber in California, to Marietta Blau’s mountaintop experiments in Austria, via the Cavendish Lab at the University of Cambridge. Our guest is Dr Suzie Sheehy. Dr Sheehy is unusual for Travels Through Time – she is a scientist rather than a historian – but she is also quite unu...
Nicholas Guyatt: The Dartmoor Massacre (1815)
May 06, 2022 13:52 - 1 hour - 54.2 MBIn the spring of 1815, as all Europe fretted about the return of Napoleon Bonaparte, a terrible massacre was perpetrated by British militiamen against American inmates at Dartmoor Prison in England. This episode has been very nearly forgotten by history. Today the historian Nicholas Guyatt takes us back to the early nineteenth-century, to the days of the very last war between Great Britain and the United States of America, to explain just what happened. Nicolas Guyatt is Professor of North...
Bronwen Riley: Journey to Britannia (130 AD)
May 03, 2022 05:00 - 49 minutes - 46.3 MBThis week we are setting sail for the Roman province of Britannia to traverse the empire's north-western frontier – Hadrian's Wall. Hadrian’s Wall is the largest archaeological feature remaining from Roman Britain, a 73-mile line of fortifications stretching from the River Tyne on the east coast to the Solway Firth on the west. Building was begun by the Emperor Hadrian in 122 AD, during a visit to this remote, unruly corner of his empire. Astonishingly, only five percent has been excavated...
Katherine Rundell: John Donne, Super-Infinite (1601)
April 26, 2022 05:00 - 57 minutes - 47.9 MBThis week we head back to Renaissance England to immerse ourselves in the world of John Donne, one of Britain’s most ingenious poets. We visit playhouses, bear-fighting pits and the poet’s marital bed to better understand Donne’s life and work. John Donne led many lives, from a young rake in his early years to archdeacon of St Paul’s in his old age. Born into a grand Catholic family who had suffered persecution under Protestant monarchs, he was intimately acquainted with the cruelty of six...
Margaret Wellesley: Hidden Hands (1413)
April 19, 2022 05:00 - 52 minutes - 51.8 MBThis week we head to fifteenth-century Norwich to meet two of the most extraordinary women in medieval England: Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. Manuscripts are one of the most tangible sources of evidence we have about the distant past and our guest this week, Mary Wellesley, has dedicated her professional life to studying them and persuading them to give up their secrets. In her spellbinding book, Hidden Hands: the Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers, she reveals traces left by the...
Mary Wellesley: Hidden Hands (1413)
April 19, 2022 05:00 - 52 minutes - 51.8 MBThis week we head to fifteenth-century Norwich to meet two of the most extraordinary women in medieval England: Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. Manuscripts are one of the most tangible sources of evidence we have about the distant past and our guest this week, Mary Wellesley, has dedicated her professional life to studying them and persuading them to give up their secrets. In her spellbinding book, Hidden Hands: the Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers, she reveals traces left by the...
Nick Higham: The Mercenary River (1837)
April 12, 2022 05:00 - 59 minutes - 50 MBThis week we head to nineteenth-century London, when the city's infrastructure was groaning under the strain of its exponential growth and the question of how to get a clean, reliable water supply was of upmost importance. We take running water in big cities like London for granted now, but for most of our history we’ve not had access to it. When did we first start pumping water up from the Thames? How did people wash themselves when they didn’t have bathrooms? Why has water been privatise...
Margaret Willes: In The Shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral (1666)
April 05, 2022 05:00 - 47 minutes - 65.6 MBThis week we revisit one of the most dangerous and dramatic moments in London's history through the prism of one of its most iconic buildings: St. Paul's Cathedral. When we think of modern London, the places that spring to mind are Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament and Piccadilly Circus, but the true heart of the city lies far to the east, on Ludgate Hill. St Paul’s Cathedral has been at the centre of London for over a millennium, a hub of religion, politics, news, education, pub...
Daniel Levy: The Great Fire of New York (1835)
March 29, 2022 04:09 - 57 minutes - 52.5 MBThere is nowhere on earth quite like New York City. In this episode the writer and journalist Daniel Levy takes us back to the early nineteenth-century and to a dramatic, catalytic moment in his home town’s development: the Great Fire of 1835. * ‘It is only necessary to sit down with a minute map of the country,’ observed the novelist James Fenimore Cooper in the 1820s, ‘to perceive at a glance, that Nature herself has intended the island of Manhattan for the site of one of the greatest co...
Matthew Green: Shadowlands (1965)
March 22, 2022 12:37 - 1 hour - 52.2 MBThis week we witness the drowning of the Tryweryn Valley, a devastating event which galvanised the Welsh nationalist cause. It’s easy to think of history as a gradual accumulation of events, buildings and people – but we don’t spend as much time thinking about its dead ends. That’s exactly what my guest today, Dr Matthew Green, does in his evocative new book Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain. In it, Matthew visits eight villages, settlements and towns stretching from the neolithi...
Seb Falk: The Astronomer and the Astrolabe (1327)
March 15, 2022 06:00 - 56 minutes - 51.9 MBIn this episode we venture on a journey of scientific discovery and meet one of the most important figures in English medieval science. Geoffrey Chaucer has gone down in history as the ‘father of English literature’ and his Canterbury Tales are celebrated across the globe as the earliest work of fiction in that language. Less well known, but equally important, is his Treatise on the Astrolabe, the first technical manual written in English, in which he describes how to make and use these ext...
Nadine Akkerman: Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts (1620)
March 11, 2022 07:50 - 48 minutes - 50.4 MBIn Women’s History Month we take a look back at a figure who has been misrepresented by successive generations of historians. Elizabeth Stuart, was the goddaughter of Elizabeth I and sister of the ill-starred Charles I of England. She was someone who played an active part on the times in which she lived. In this episode the Dutch historian Nadine Akkerman takes us back to meet a woman who was known as ‘The Queen of Hearts.’ In her riveting new book, Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts, Nadine...
Anthony Tucker-Jones: Winston Churchill and Victory in North Africa (1943)
March 08, 2022 05:43 - 55 minutes - 50.1 MBIn this episode the military historian Anthony Tucker-Jones shares his latest research on one of the great figures in British history: Winston Churchill. To get a close look at Churchill’s personality and his modus operandi, he takes us back to the year 1943 – a pivotal year at the heart of the Second World War. * The fall of Tunis in May 1943 marked the first liberation of an occupied city by the Allies. It was a significant moment, the military historian Anthony Tucker-Jones argues, as i...
Christopher de Bellaigue: Suleyman the Magnificent (1534)
March 01, 2022 06:00 - 58 minutes - 55.7 MBThis week we travel back to the Islamic year 941 which straddles 1534/5 of our own calendar, a particularly deadly year in the reign of the Ottoman Emperor, Suleyman the Magnificent. There was no shortage of extraordinary rulers in the sixteenth century: Ivan the Terrible towered over Russia, England had its own Gloriana, Elizabeth I, Charles V governed the vast Holy Roman Empire, while in India, the Emperor Akbar transformed Mughal culture. But every one of these mighty potentates cowered...
Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen: A History of the Library (1850)
February 22, 2022 06:00 - 54 minutes - 52.6 MBOf all the accomplishments of human civilisation, the creation of libraries, making the preservation and transmission of knowledge possible, is surely the greatest. In this episode the academics Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen take us back to 1850, a pivotal moment in the history of public libraries. Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen’s new book, The Library, A Fragile History, takes on the ‘long and tumultuous history’ of these noble institutions, from the clay tablets of anc...
Lulu Jemimah: The Last Pre-Colonial King of Buganda (1885)
February 15, 2022 06:00 - 42 minutes - 36.2 MBThis week we meet a misunderstood king who resisted colonial rule. History is full of kings and queens with bad reputations. And yet, on closer inspection, we often find these reputations weren’t always entirely justified. That’s the argument that my guest today, Lulu Jemimah, makes for King Mwanga II – the last pre-colonial king of Buganda before British colonial rule. King Mwanga is known mostly for his part in killing 45 young pages who were Christian converts between 1885 and 1887, la...
Ronen Steinke: The Arab Doctor and the Jewish Girl (1943)
February 08, 2022 06:00 - 56 minutes - 45.4 MBIn this episode of Travels Through Time we meet two extraordinarily brave people who formed an unlikely friendship in Hitler's Berlin. Their names were Dr Mohammed Helmy – a Muslim Egyptian doctor who had been living in Berlin since coming to study there in 1922 – and Anna Boros, a sixteen year old Jewish girl. When the Nazi regime's persecution of Jewish people started to escalate, Anna's mother approached Dr Helmy to ask for his help. His solution was to form a unique and daring plan tha...
Dr Priya Atwal: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire (1837)
February 01, 2022 06:00 - 50 minutes - 53.1 MBIn this episode of Travels Through Time we attend a magnificent Sikh royal wedding which was as much carefully orchestrated political theatre as it was the union of two people before god. Indian weddings are famous for their exuberance and that of Prince Nau Nihal Singh, who married Bibi Nanaki Kaur Atariwala in 1837, may well have been the most extravagant of all time. This lavish month-long celebration was an emotional moment for the young Prince’s grandparents, Ranjit Singh, ‘the lion ...
David Bosco: The Struggle to Rule the Ocean (1982)
January 25, 2022 06:00 - 52 minutes - 48.2 MBIn this delightfully modern episode of Travels Through Time we are setting sail for an adventure on the high seas. Our guest is David Bosco, author of The Poseidon Project, The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans, in which he charts the efforts of international organisations to create consensus and establish a structure of globally recognised rules for the oceans. In this episode David takes us back to 1982, a fraught year on the high seas when Britain was battling Argentina in the Sout...
Edward Shawcross: The Last Emperor of Mexico (1867)
January 18, 2022 05:45 - 1 hour - 59.4 MBToday we’re off to the nineteenth century to examine an event that Karl Marx called ‘One of the most monstrous enterprises in the annals of international history.’ Edward Shawcross takes us back to meet Maximilian, the Last Emperor of Mexico. * The 1860s were a decisive decade in the emergence of the modern world. As Britain’s empire expanded, and the United States emerged entire from a debilitating Civil War, an audacious French scheme to place an Austrian archduke on an invented throne...
Roderick Beaton: Herodotus and the Birth of Written History (447 BCE)
January 11, 2022 06:00 - 57 minutes - 58.4 MBThis week we are going back to witness the birth of history as a written discipline. Our guide on this long journey into the ancient world has spent his life studying and teaching Greek language and culture, but it was when he retired from academia that Professor Roderick Beaton found the time to write the book he had been dreaming about since he first visited Greece as a teenager. The Greeks, A Global History is a masterful, sweeping journey through 3500 years of history that tells the sto...
Nick Rennison: Scenes from a Turbulent Year (1922)
January 04, 2022 06:00 - 56 minutes - 41.7 MBIn our first episode of 2022, we’re travelling back exactly a hundred years. We visit three self-contained moments – the trial of Hollywood’s much-loved comedian ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle for the murder of Virginia Rappe, the assassination of the Weimer Republic politician Walther Rathenau and the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. Each one sheds light on a different facet of the modern world that was 1922. Our guest is Nick Rennison, whose most recent book 1922: Scenes from a Turbulent Year charts ...
Christmas with the Three Wise Historians (2021)
December 24, 2021 15:23 - 55 minutes - 60.8 MBIn this Christmas special of Travels Through Time our three wise presenters Peter, Violet and Artemis get together to remember some of their favourite books and episodes from the last year on the podcast. Thank you so much to all of our listeners for joining us over the course of the year and happy Christmas! As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com. Click here to order the books discussed in this episode from John Sandoe’s who, we are deli...
Tom Chivers: Journeys into Deep London (62 AD)
December 21, 2021 06:00 - 58 minutes - 61.4 MBIn this episode we visit London in 62 AD, barely twenty years after it was first established by the Romans, to traverse its lost landscape and hidden waterways. When we think of London, we usually think of a sprawling urban metropolis: glass and steel, terraced houses, every imaginable form of transport and noise. We don’t often think about the natural landscape that lies beneath it all. And yet, our guest today argues, it is London’s geology that has been a crucial force in the shaping of ...
Elizabeth Drayson: The Last Muslim Sultan of Granada (1492)
December 14, 2021 06:00 - 54 minutes - 44.6 MBThis week we head to Granada in southern Spain to witness one of the most important years in the history of not only Europe, but the whole world. In 711 a band of Berber tribesmen made the short voyage from North Africa to Southern Spain, landing near Gibraltar. The land they found mesmerised them with its beauty and natural abundance, they settled down, built cities and were joined by Arabs from across the vast Muslim Empire who made al-Andalus their home. Towards the end of the eleventh ...
Nigel Pickford: Samuel Pepys and the Strange Wrecking of the Gloucester (1682)
December 10, 2021 05:40 - 1 hour - 54.1 MBOn the morning of 6 May 1682, in unremarkable weather, the Gloucester, a 50-gun frigate of the Royal Navy, collided with a sandbank off the Norfolk coast. The wreck that followed was no ordinary one. For aboard was James, Duke of York, heir to the English throne and a glittering array of fellow travellers. Within hours of the collision, two hundred people were dead. Today we travel back to the late seventeenth century and to the Norfolk coast to witness that dramatic shipwreck. It was an ev...
Zoë Playdon: The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes (1967)
December 07, 2021 06:00 - 1 hour - 41.6 MBThis week we uncover a fascinating legal case that had major implications for transgender rights in the U.K., but that has been hidden for the last fifty years. Ewan Forbes was born in 1912 into an aristocratic Scottish family. He grew up in Aberdeenshire, studied medicine, started practising as a doctor in his local community and married. His patients and neighbours were aware that Ewan had been christened Elisabeth, but that, apart from a few exceptions, he had been viewed as a boy by him...
Jamie Mackay: Garibaldi and the Birth of Italy (1860)
November 30, 2021 09:43 - 49 minutes - 24.7 MBThis week we are sweeping through Sicily and Southern Italy in the company of the original revolutionary hero, Giuseppe Maria Garibaldi. In the mid nineteenth century, change was in the air as new political movements began questioning the status quo. Powerful ideas like socialism, republicanism, liberalism and nationalism were spreading through Europe, harnessed by charismatic leaders determined to bring about dramatic social change. None were more charismatic than Giuseppe Garibaldi. Our ...
Christina Lamb and Judith Mackrell: Looking for Trouble with Virginia Cowles (1938)
November 23, 2021 05:55 - 57 minutes - 44.8 MBFlinging off her heels under shellfire in Civil War Spain. Taking tea with Hitler after a Nuremberg rally. Gossipping with Churchill by his goldfish pond. The pioneering 1930s female war correspondent Virginia Cowles did all of these things. In this special episode, we’re joined by not one, but two experts to discuss the life of the trailblazing Virginia Cowles. The first is the author Judith Mackrell, whose most recent book, Going with the Boys, follows six women journalists, including V...
Tracy Borman: Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada (1588)
November 16, 2021 05:46 - 48 minutes - 47.2 MBHistorians often refer to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I as being England’s Golden Age. And of all the forty-five years in which she was the monarch, the year 1588 stands out as the most dramatic. It was a year of peril, a year of valour and a year of heartbreak. In this episode bestselling historian and novelist Tracy Borman takes us back to the anxiety-ridden days of 1588. We watch on as the queen makes a speech that will pass into legend. We hover close by as one of her most famous portr...
Robert Lyman: A War of Empires (1944)
November 11, 2021 06:18 - 57 minutes - 52 MBOn this Remembrance Day the eminent historian Robert Lyman takes us to Burma, a country that was the crucible of action for a range of competing powers in the Second World War. In Burma the invading Japanese confronted the British, India, Chinese and Americans in a story that really became, as Lyman makes plain, ‘a war of empires.’ * For thirty years Robert Lyman has been studying the war in the Far East. While not as well-known as the conflict with the Nazis in Europe, events in south eas...
Robert Sackville-West: The Missing of the First World War (1915)
November 09, 2021 05:28 - 57 minutes - 43 MBThe Armistice in 1918 might have brought an end to the violence. But for many families it did not mean the end of the story. In 1918 the whereabouts of more than half a million British soldiers alone remained unknown. These were often very young people, drawn from all walks of life, right across Britain. They were people who had simply vanished into the battlefields. In this episode Robert Sackville-West takes us back to the desperate days of the First World War a century ago. He shows us ...
James Clark: The Dissolution of the Monasteries (1540)
November 02, 2021 14:43 - 1 hour - 50.7 MBLong into the sixteenth century monasteries remained a familiar and vital part of English society. Wherever you were in the kingdom – Yorkshire, Cornwall, London, the Lakes – it was almost certain that there was a monastery just a short walk away. And yet within a few short years in the 1530s, 850 of these institutions vanished for good. The dissolution of the monasteries really was, today's guest, James Clark argues, ‘the great drama of Henry VIII’s Reformation’. It was the process that h...
Malcolm Gaskill: An Execution and a Witch (1649)
October 29, 2021 04:12 - 1 hour - 51.8 MBOn a cold midwinter’s day in 1649, King Charles I stepped onto a platform in Whitehall. He knelt down and said a prayer. Then he stretched his arms forward to signal that he was ready to die. As the axe swung down, the crowd that had gathered emitted a sound that was later recalled as a ‘collective groan.’ The killing of a king, an unheard of act, brought a shocking end to a destructive decade of civil war in England. In this episode of the historian Malcolm Gaskill explains how that act wa...
Justine Picardie: Miss Dior (1947)
October 26, 2021 04:12 - 1 hour - 46.9 MBWriter and journalist Justine Picardie takes us back to 1947 to meet resistance fighter Catherine Dior. The youngest sister of the renowned French designer, Catherine’s story of survival during World War 2 is one of great courage and it is being told at last. * In 1947, Christian Dior launched his debut collection in Paris and became a sensation. His designs were characterised by enormous, fairy-tale-like skirts and hyper-feminine silhouettes. It was christened the ‘New Look’ by the editor...
Garry J Shaw: Ancient Egypt and Tutankhamun (c.1335 BC)
October 19, 2021 20:52 - 59 minutes - 44.7 MBTutankhamun. That one word is enough to conjure up enticing images of Ancient Egypt: dashing chariots, mighty temples, little skiffs sailing on the Nile and, most of all, the king's own transfixing Golden Mask. But who really was Tutankhamun, this figure who has come to represent so much? In this episode we are joined by the Egyptologist Garry J. Shaw who takes us back to the age of Tutankhamun in the second millennium BC. This was, Shaw explains, an exhilarating time to be alive. Great te...
Neil Oliver: Skara Brae (2,500 BC)
October 14, 2021 04:35 - 1 hour - 57.8 MBToday we speak to the archeologist and broadcaster Neil Oliver, a figure familiar to millions in the UK. While Oliver's television work has taken him around the world, he retains a special connection to his Scottish homeland. One historical site, in particular, continues to enchant him: Skara Brae. Skara Brae on the wind scoured Orkney Islands is the best-preserved Neolithic settlement in all of western Europe. Embedded inside its stone houses and in the surviving monuments are tantalising ...
Michael Pye: The City at the Hub of the World (1549)
October 05, 2021 04:15 - 48 minutes - 49.3 MBIn the sixteenth-century there was nowhere quite like Antwerp. Tolerant, energetic, independent, vibrant; Antwerp sat at the heart of a busy and growing trading network. After the Portuguese moved the spice trade to Antwerp it became a fierce rival to Venice. It was a place that many came to call. 'the city at the hub of the world.' Today’s guest is the historian, columnist and broadcaster Michael Pye. For many years Pye has been investigating Antwerp’s distinctive culture and unique plac...