Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchBernard Montgomery: The Brilliant, Unbearable British General Who Won at El Alamein and Alienated Every Ally
Episode 7146
Bernard Montgomery won the Battle of El Alamein — the first major British land victory of World War II — and spent the rest of the war making every A…
1 week, 2 days ago
Rudolf Diesel: The Engineer Who Invented the Diesel Engine and Vanished From a Ship
Episode 7149
Rudolf Diesel invented the engine that bears his name — the most efficient internal combustion engine ever designed — and then disappeared from a cro…
1 week, 2 days ago
Subhas Chandra Bose: The Militant Indian Nationalist Who Allied With Hitler and Japan to Fight the British
Episode 7150
Subhas Chandra Bose was one of India's most popular independence leaders — and he allied with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan to fight the British Em…
1 week, 2 days ago
Samuel Morse: The Failed Portrait Painter Who Connected the World With Dots and Dashes
Episode 7148
Samuel Morse was a portrait painter who wanted to be remembered as an artist — and is instead remembered for the telegraph and the code that bears hi…
1 week, 2 days ago
Benazir Bhutto: The Contradictory Life of Pakistan's First Female Prime Minister
Episode 7147
Benazir Bhutto was Pakistan's first female prime minister in a country where women were marginalized from public life — and she was removed from powe…
1 week, 2 days ago
Rumi: How a Medieval Islamic Jurist Became the Best-Selling Poet in America
Episode 7139
Rumi was a respected Islamic law professor in thirteenth-century Konya when a wandering mystic named Shams-i-Tabrizi walked into his life and shatter…
1 week, 2 days ago
Niccolo Paganini: The Violinist Who Was So Good People Thought He'd Sold His Soul to the Devil
Episode 7137
Niccolo Paganini played the violin with such supernatural skill that audiences genuinely believed he had made a pact with the devil. He could play en…
1 week, 2 days ago
Du Fu: How Failure, War, and Starvation Forged China's Greatest Poet
Episode 7140
Du Fu failed the imperial examinations, never held a significant government post, and spent most of his adult life as a refugee fleeing the An Lushan…
1 week, 2 days ago
Ray Bradbury: The Roller-Skating Library Kid Who Wrote His Way From Depression-Era Los Angeles to Mars
Episode 7144
Ray Bradbury roller-skated to the library every day as a kid because his family could not afford books, wrote Fahrenheit 451 on a rented typewriter i…
1 week, 2 days ago
Bram Stoker: How a Dublin Bureaucrat Created Dracula and Invented Modern Horror
Episode 7138
Bram Stoker was a civil servant in Dublin Castle who moonlighted as the business manager for actor Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre. He had no lite…
1 week, 2 days ago