The Dark History of Ballet

Travel back to post-WW1 London, when sex, drugs and music was exploding in Soho... causing a national moral panic.The drugs of choice? Cocaine and morphine. Still used by doctors for questionable medi...

11 Mar 202535min

What was life like to be married to Genghis Khan?In this new limited series, Real Wives of Dictators, we're finding out all about the women behind, or alongside, some of histories most notorious men.F...

7 Mar 202539min

When we think about Greek and Roman beauty, we think of marble statues of huge men with tiny...feet.But what did it mean to be a beautiful woman? What role did their ideas of ugliness play in these id...

4 Mar 202543min

Michelangelo made religion sexy.That may not have been his initial aim, of course, but the way he portrayed the human form, and particularly the male form, was extremely beautiful.How did his devout C...

28 Feb 202550min

When and why did Soho become a hedonistic hotspot, the home of sex, drugs and music?Kate is Betwixt the Sheets with Dan Snow to talk about post-WW1 London - when a dark underworld of shady characters ...

25 Feb 202531min

Between 1860 and 1925, tens of thousands of women worked in Dublin's Monto, the largest red light district in Europe.It was a world of narrow alleyways full of brothels busy with sex workers, at a tim...

21 Feb 202551min

Dark ideas and stigma around different body sizes really took hold in the Enlightenment.Very unenlightened, if you ask us.This started all sorts of awful movements, and one result was BMI - or Body Ma...

18 Feb 202546min

Societies all throughout history have tried to control female sexuality.Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes are two examples of this, where women were imprisoned against their will...

14 Feb 202549min