Why we shouldn't see museum artefacts as 'stolen'
Debates about whether museum artefacts should be returned to the cultures that made them have made headlines several times in recent years. But historian and author Justin M Jacobs explains to Matt El...
30 Mar 202545min
The Belle Époque: everything you wanted to know
Paris's Belle Époque – or 'Beautiful Era' – conjures up images of cafés, can-can dancers and sunny walks along the River Seine. But was life in the French capital in the late 19th and early 20th-centu...
30 Mar 202550min
Body in the basement: Dr Crippen and the 'crime of the century'
In 1910, music hall performer Belle Elmore went missing. Her husband Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen claimed Belle had gone to America to visit a dying relative. But before long, Crippen's stories began to u...
28 Mar 202547min
The Philadelphia gun-runners who supplied the IRA
In the 1970s, as the Troubles divided Northern Ireland, hundreds of armalite guns were sent to the IRA from across the Atlantic. Reporter Ali Watkins follows the smuggling operations of a ragtag group...
26 Mar 202529min
Thomas Becket: life of week
Thomas Becket is probably medieval England's most famous martyr and saint – yet the circumstances of his life are overshadowed by his infamous feud with King Henry II, and his shocking murder in Cante...
25 Mar 202551min
Why Africa's history is more than just the slave trade
Has our focus on the impact of the transatlantic slave trade blinded us to the diversity and complexity of Africa's past? That's one of the arguments at the heart of Luke Pepera's new book Motherland,...
24 Mar 202538min
The Great Stink: everything you wanted to know
Why, in the 1850s, was the excrement of thousands of people being deposited straight into the Thames? How lethal were Victorian London's cholera outbreaks? And why is Joseph Bazalgette one of the most...
23 Mar 202540min
Handel's Messiah: the scandalous birth of a classical masterpiece
Even if you're not a fan of classical music, chances are you will have heard Handel's Messiah. Going behind the scenes of its creation, Charles King delves into the shifting politics of the Hanoverian...
21 Mar 202539min
