The House of Byron
Emily Brand has written a brilliant book about the Byrons. Not just the great romantic, poet and adventurer, George Gordon Byron, but his parents and grandparents who are equally as deserving of our a...
12 Apr 202026min
The Prime Minister Hospitalised: Lloyd George's Influenza
In September 1918 David Lloyd George, the charismatic wartime Prime Minister, visited the city of Manchester, attended a vast public gathering and then collapsed. He spent the next week and a half con...
10 Apr 202019min
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
