Joan of Arc: life of the week
Joan of Arc has gone down in history as the virgin saviour of France – a patriotic martyr who was unjustly burnt at the stake at the hands of her Anglo-Burgundian opponents. But there's more to the st...
26 Mar 202454min
Leftovers: how our ancestors battled food waste
From Tudor slop buckets to WW2 potato peel recipes, Eleanor Barnett tells Ellie Cawthorne about how our ancestors used up food leftovers. She reveals some ingenious and appetising tactics for tackling...
25 Mar 202429min
WW1's eastern front: everything you wanted to know
How did the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand lead events in Europe to spiral out of control so rapidly? Why was Germany and Austria-Hungary's bloody clash with the Russian empire during the First Wo...
24 Mar 202441min
Eric 'Winkle' Brown: Britain's most extraordinary pilot
It would be fair to say that Second World War pilot Eric 'Winkle' Brown led an extraordinary life. He narrowly escaped death when his ship was torpedoed, smashed the world record for flying the most t...
22 Mar 202433min
Tiger Tamer | 5. crazy about wheelbarrows
The great wheelbarrow craze of 1886-7 was a short-lived media sensation, witnessing a flood of people charging from Scotland to London with barrows. One man had kicked off this bizarre trend – Bob Car...
21 Mar 202428min
Will the real Jesus please stand up?
In the modern world we have a relatively narrow idea of who Jesus was, but things were quite different in the early years of Christianity. Many alternative versions of his life and personality prolife...
20 Mar 202427min
Mary Wollstonecraft: life of the week
Mary Wollstonecraft was a firebrand thinker of the Enlightenment – proposing radical ideas about the fundamental rights of women. And her life was just as groundbreaking as her work, from having a fro...
19 Mar 202441min
An obscenity trial that shocked Victorian Britain
In 1877, Annie Besant took the stand. She was on trial for selling an "obscene publication" – a pamphlet designed to educate the masses on birth control. Author Michael Meyer tells Ellie Cawthorne abo...
18 Mar 202438min
