Podcast Episodes

Ezequiel Mercau, "The Falklands War: An Imperial History" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Episode 709

The Falklands War was in many ways the defining event in the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. In many ways it was also the last roar of the British Lion. An event shrouded in both nostalgia and patr…

Published on 5 years, 9 months ago

Mathias Haeussler, "Helmut Schmidt and British-German Relations: A European Misunderstanding" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Episode 707

The former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt grew up as a devout Anglophile, yet he clashed heavily and repeatedly with his British counterparts Wilson, Callaghan, and Thatcher during his time in…

Published on 5 years, 9 months ago

Sumit K. Mandal, "Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Episode 60

In the wake of the so-called war on terror we’ve become accustomed to racialized portrayals of the Arab as an inflexible and threatening other to the mores and ways of the non-Arab world. Although th…

Published on 5 years, 9 months ago

Kareem Khalifa, "Understanding, Explanation and Scientific Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2017)

Episode 213

What is the relation between understanding and knowledge in science? Can we understand a scientific theory if it is false? Do we understand a scientific proposition we can’t elaborate or do anything …

Published on 5 years, 9 months ago

Jonathan Hopkin, "Anti-System Politics: The Crisis of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Episode 409

Should we understand the rise of Trump or the success of Brexit in terms of populism? Culture? Xenophobia? Do the same political forces produce Sanders and Trump? In his new book Anti-System Politics…

Published on 5 years, 9 months ago

Aimee Fox, "Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army, 1914-1918" (Cambridge UP, 2017)

Episode 699

Learning, innovation and adaptation are not concepts that we necessarily associate with the British Army of the First World War. Yet the need to learn from mistakes, to exploit new opportunities and …

Published on 5 years, 9 months ago

Rebecca E. Zietlow, "The Forgotten Emancipator: James Mitchell Ashley and the Ideological Origins of Reconstruction" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Episode 163

Though the story of emancipation is well known in American history, the roles of many of the key figures involved in it are often overlooked. Among them is James Mitchell Ashley, the Ohio congressman…

Published on 5 years, 9 months ago

Sohaira Siddiqui, "Law and Politics Under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

In her intimidatingly brilliant new book Law and Politics Under the Abbasids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Sohaira Siddiqui conducts a masterful analysis…

Published on 5 years, 10 months ago

Sarah Stockwell, "The British End of the British Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Episode 694

How did de-colonialization impact the United Kingdom itself? That is a topic that Professor of Imperial & Commonwealth History at King’s College, London, Sarah Stockwell aims to tackle in her latest …

Published on 5 years, 10 months ago

Ayelet Hoffmann Libson, "Law and Self-Knowledge in the Talmud" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

Episode 45

Law and Self-Knowledge in the Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2018) examines the emergence of self-knowledge as a determining legal consideration among the rabbis of Late Antiquity, from the thir…

Published on 5 years, 10 months ago