Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchEmma Goldman: life of the week
Episode 2568
Anarchist, feminist, revolutionary: 19th-century activist and writer Emma Goldman emigrated from the Russian empire to the United States as a teenage…
2 months, 3 weeks ago
Stealing the V2 rocket: Britain’s secret WW2 intelligence coup
Episode 2567
In 1944, as Allied troops pushed across Europe after D-Day, the Allies faced a terrifying new threat: Hitler’s V2 weapons, striking without warning a…
2 months, 3 weeks ago
The road to the American Revolutionary War
Episode 2566
The United States often presents its birth as a straightforward struggle for liberty – but reality was far more messy. In this first episode of Histo…
2 months, 3 weeks ago
The protestant missionaries that didn't change the world
Episode 2565
Why did Protestant missionaries travel the globe across the course of centuries, only to convert remarkably few people? Alec Ryrie – author of new bo…
2 months, 4 weeks ago
Strangers and aliens in Tudor England
Episode 2564
Many histories of the 16th century tell stories of monarchs and courtiers – but there is, of course, much more to the century than that. Speaking to …
3 months ago
Alexander the Great: life of the week
Episode 2563
Stretching from Greece to India, Alexander the Great’s empire was one of the largest in human history, and he’d conquered it all by the time he was 3…
3 months ago
What myths do we tell about royal women?
Episode 2562
Have royal women's stories been misconstrued? Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, Kate Williams argues that many of them have been, tracing the lives of a …
3 months ago
Cleopatra’s death – and cultural afterlife
Episode 2561
The final chapter of Cleopatra’s life is shrouded in mystery. Did she really take her own life? Was an asp involved? And why don’t we know where her …
3 months ago
Masters of disinformation: how British spies played dirty in the Cold War
Episode 2560
They 'haunted' an Indonesian general with a talking ghost and planted fake hippies in a Bulgarian youth festival. But did they change the course of t…
3 months ago
Churchill's toughest decision
Episode 2559
In the summer of 1940, the Royal Navy attacked a French fleet moored off the coast of north Africa, killing almost 1,300 sailors. Winston Churchill d…
3 months, 1 week ago