
The cult of Freud: science, sex & psychoanalysis
From the Oedipus complex to the Freudian slip, the theories of Sigmund Freud are still familiar to us today. But how much do we know about his life? Seamus O’Mahony tells the story of the founder of p...
22 Helmi 202346min

Breastfeeding: a cultural history
Breastfeeding may seem like an innate human experience that transcends history. But, according to art and cultural historian Joanna Wolfarth, experiences of feeding babies have always been embedded in...
21 Helmi 202327min

Heliogabalus: Rome’s scandalous emperor
The story of the Roman emperor Heliogabalus is filled with sex, death, decadence and religious extremism, but it also touches on some key questions about imperial Rome. What were the limits of politic...
20 Helmi 202336min

Interwar Britain: everything you wanted to know
How ‘roaring’ were the roaring twenties for ordinary britons? Did views of the British empire change after the first world war?And what caused the economic woes of the 1930s? Speaking to Elinor Evans,...
19 Helmi 202356min

Which LGBTQ+ histories get told – and which get overlooked?
Uncovering and telling the stories of LGBTQ+ people in history can be rewarding, important work, but it’s also often challenging and complex. How far is it possible to understand the sexualities of pe...
17 Helmi 202345min

From the Middle Ages to #MeToo: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath
The Wife of Bath is a stand-out figure in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The only ordinary woman in the procession of pilgrims heading to Thomas Becket’s shrine, Alison is a sexually active, out...
16 Helmi 202344min

Astonishing Æthelstan: Michael Wood on the 10th-century king
Anglo-Saxon king Æthelstan was the first West Saxon leader to effectively rule over all of England. And with Alfred the Great as a grandfather, he had quite the family legacy to live up to. Speaking w...
15 Helmi 202330min

Cleopatra’s triumphant daughter
When Cleopatra took her own life in 30 BC it marked the conclusion of Egypt’s ruling dynasty, but not the end of her family line. Classicist Jane Draycott tells the little-known story of Cleopatra Sel...
14 Helmi 202337min




















