90. A war fought for no good reason

This episode wraps up the outbreak of the First World War and the first phase of great offences in which all sides sought glory and, above all, quick victory. Something that eluded them. We spend a li...

10 Mar 202414min

We’ve now reached the brink of the First World War. Before we dive in, this episode looks at how warfare had changed in the previous hundred years or so, with weapons far deadlier than had existed bef...

3 Mar 202414min

In this episode we keep following the downward spiral into violence in the years after 1910. There was the violence of the Suffragettes and the brutal treatment handed out to them in return. There was...

25 Feb 202414min

We’ve reached a time of rising violence in English history. This episode concentrates firstly, and briefly, on the violence around the growing militancy of the trade union movement, worrying and ugly ...

18 Feb 202414min

The general elections of 1910 left Asquith’s Liberal government dependent, to stay in office, on the votes of the Irish Nationalist MPs. The price of their support was a renewed attempt to drive throu...

11 Feb 202414min

This week we’re back with women’s suffrage movement, as the conflict heated up and turned a lot uglier. That was partly because one of the main movements, the Suffragette Women’s Social and Political...

4 Feb 202414min

The year 1911 was action-packed. Churchill, who’d been made Home Secretary the year before and got caught up in that great fake-news event, the Tonypandy massacre, added to his reputation, not in a g...

28 Jan 202414min

1910 was a year of battle between the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Which means a year of battle between the Liberals, with their (initially) huge majority in the Commons, and the Unionists...

21 Jan 202414min