Barmier than Bond: Ian Fleming's extraordinary wartime escapades
Bogus sex parties, fake corpses, exploding tin cans and belligerent pigs. If you thought that James Bond's fictional escapades were outrageous, then the real-life experiences of his creator, Ian Flemi...
15 Jun 202539min
Fatherhood: a short history
What does it mean to be a father? When did people first start talking about men as 'father figures'? And how has the concept of fatherhood changed over the millennia? In conversation with David Musgro...
14 Jun 202538min
CIA book smugglers of the Cold War
During the Cold War, the CIA book programme was a covert campaign to smuggle books into the Eastern Bloc using everything from balloon drops to baked bean tins. But why was literature such a significa...
12 Jun 202534min
The Renaissance: not such a golden age?
From Michelangelo's David and Machiavelli's The Prince to the plays of Shakespeare, the Renaissance produced some of history's most astounding works of culture, art and innovation. But can focusing on...
10 Jun 202547min
Archimedes: life of the week
He’s best known for his Eureka moment, but Archimedes was far more than a naked man in a bathtub. Speaking to Kev Lochun, Professor Michael Scott takes us through the wild imagination of this Ancient ...
9 Jun 202532min
The Third Reich's first genocide
Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazis killed nearly 300,000 people with learning disabilities or psychiatric illnesses. Some 400,000 more were forcibly sterilised. Historian Dagmar Herzog speaks to Ellie C...
8 Jun 202538min
English folklore: everything you wanted to know
What happens when you step inside a fairy ring? Where did the figure of the Green Man come from? And why have so many East Anglians been terrorised by a menacing, dog-like creature called Black Shuck?...
7 Jun 202545min
What happened in Shakespeare's "lost years"?
Shakespeare is now a towering figure of global theatre. But in the 1590s, he was just an up-and-coming young playwright, trying to scratch out a living in Shoreditch's emerging theatre scene. Daniel S...
5 Jun 202535min
