The real Miss Moneypennys: the secret history of Britain's female spies
From cleaners to codebreakers, women’s contributions to the history of British intelligence have often gone unrecognised and forgotten. But in actuality, female operatives penetrated enemy networks, e...
23 Sep 202547min
Andrew Carnegie: life of the week
How did a man who crushed unions in Gilded Age America come to see himself as humanity’s benefactor? Speaking to Elinor Evans, historian and biographer David Nasaw explores the many contradictions of ...
22 Sep 202547min
Wages for housework: the daring 1970s campaign that challenged women's roles
In the 1970s, a global group of feminist activists banded together with one demand: 'wages for housework'. Emily Callaci explores this campaign in her Cundill Prize-nominated book Wages for Housework ...
21 Sep 202528min
Ancient Roman theatre: everything you wanted to know
Who went to the theatre in ancient Rome – and what kind of spectacle would they have expected to see? And did the drama performed on stage reflect the politics, society and culture of the day? Emily B...
20 Sep 202540min
Haiti's first and only king
Born to an enslaved mother in the British Caribbean in the tumultuous, brutal world of the late 18th century, Henry Christoph's role in the Haitian Revolution saw him rise to prominence – and was just...
18 Sep 202552min
How the Cold War made the modern world
For most of the latter half of the 20th century, the world was frozen in a standoff. The Cold War era was defined by the ideological fissure between capitalism, led by the United States, and communism...
16 Sep 202547min
Alva Vanderbilt: life of the week
Climbing to the top of Gilded Age society in 19th-century America, socialite Alva Vanderbilt made headlines for being one of the first elite women to divorce on her terms, and she later turned her amb...
15 Sep 202540min
How women were erased from economic history
Across 12,000 years of history, prosperity has flourished in societies where women could fully participate – and faltered when they were pushed to the margins. That's what Dr Victoria Bateman argues i...
14 Sep 202546min
