How Pandemics Made the Modern World
Professor Frank Snowden is currently on lockdown in Rome, experiencing at first hand life in a pandemic. For years he has written about the great waves of disease that swept across the world in the pa...
9 Apr 202034min
Loot? Spoils? Artefacts? What to Do with Our Museums
Our museums are full of stuff taken, bought, stolen and gifted from foreign countries. It feels like we face a reckoning. What shall we do with it?I talked to two authors of new books that wrestle wit...
8 Apr 202026min
Death by Shakespeare
Poison, swordplay and bloodshed. Shakespeare’s characters met their ends in a plethora of gruesome ways. But how realistic were they? And did they even shock audiences who lived in a time of plague, p...
6 Apr 202017min
The Battle of Okinawa
The last great battle of the Second World War was fought on the island of Okinawa. After 83 blood-soaked days, almost a quarter of a million people lost their lives. The death toll included thousands ...
3 Apr 202027min
Origins of the Spanish Flu
This episode features military historian Douglas Gill who has extensively researched the origins of the Spanish Influenza as it emerged in 1915 and 1916 in northern France. Douglas has worked alongsid...
2 Apr 202018min
Valkyrie: The Warrior Women of the Viking World
I was thrilled to have Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir on the pod. We talked about Viking women, old Norse-Icelandic sagas, mythology and poetry. Who were these Viking women who were champions on the ba...
1 Apr 202017min
Battle of Britain 'What Ifs'
Dr. Jamie Wood and Professor Niall Mackay at the University of York are mathematicians who love history. Sensible dudes. They released a paper which sent the rest of the history world into a meltdown ...
30 Mar 202035min
A Strange Bit of History
We were delighted to have comedy royalty on the podcast. Omid Djalili talked to me about one of his earliest stage creations, first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1993. Over the next fo...
29 Mar 202029min
