Origins of the Silk Road

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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