Podcast Episodes
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Post war lesbian life in Britain
Join us on The Explaining History Podcast as we welcome Dame Vikki Heywood, former Executive Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court Theatre, to discuss her dazzling debut novel…
Published on 5 months ago
Edwardian Britain's most famous fraudster
Join us on The Explaining History Podcast as we sit down with historian and author Mark Bridgeman to unravel the extraordinary life—and daring deceptions—of Violet Charlesworth, Britain’s first notor…
Published on 5 months ago
Oligarchy in America and Russia
At the end of the 20th Century, the Cold War which had defined the struggle between various different iterations of capitalism in the western world and the USSR in the east was replaced by a slow oli…
Published on 5 months, 1 week ago
Trump's ICE brownshirts, an historical analysis
Nazism sought to bypass legal norms where it couldn't just sweep them aside. The German Weimar constitution took time to dismantle and new institutions, practices and laws needed to be created in ord…
Published on 5 months, 1 week ago
Bowie and the 1960s
In this episode of Explaining History, we dive into the fascinating world of David Bowie’s 1960s—a decade of shifting cultural currents, personal reinvention, and the search for identity that would s…
Published on 5 months, 1 week ago
British spies in Mesopotamia - 1915
This episode explores part of the story of St John Philby, father to Kim and eventually advisor to King Ibn Saud. Philby was one of the few administrators that the British government and its colonial…
Published on 5 months, 1 week ago
Literary tastes, readers and book clubs in the inter war period
In the first decades of the 20th Century, a growth in literacy and the availability of paperback and hardback books created a culture of mass participation on literary reading that was unprecedented.…
Published on 5 months, 1 week ago
Austerity Britain 2010 - 2025
The project to permanently shrink the British state and to inflict mass hardship on the most vulnerable which was commenced after 2010 has cost untold numbers of lives. The last calculations put the …
Published on 5 months, 1 week ago
France: Collaboration and Occupation 1940-45
When France was defeated in 1940, across its empire it underwent a period of civil war as Vichy and Free French forces faced one another. Until at least 1943 there were widespread sympathies across F…
Published on 5 months, 2 weeks ago
America, oil shocks and the crisis of the 1970s
In this episode, we dive into the turbulent decade of the 1970s, exploring how the oil shocks and economic crises of the era shattered the postwar order in America. Drawing from historian Gary Gerst…
Published on 5 months, 2 weeks ago