Legacy

Why does every dictator, sooner or later, want to host the World Cup?What did a military junta that never wanted the tournament discover once the goals started going in?And when a hundred thousand peo...

6 Aug 38min

What happened when the people written out of the Grand Tour wrote their own account of it?What did an eighteenth-century Bengali diplomat see in London that made him call the British a conceited race?...

4 Aug 43min

What's a garnet mined in Sri Lanka two and a half thousand years ago doing in a silver hairpin dug up near Bruges? Why are the Duke of Burgundy and the conqueror of Constantinople staring each other d...

30 Jul 31min

What actually turned a teenage aristocrat into a "finished" gentleman in the 1700s? Why did one incredibly long, incredibly expensive holiday end up inventing the whole idea of "the West"? And why can...

28 Jul 38min

What does it take to get a room of ex-military festival-goers in rural Wiltshire to agree Britain should return its stolen gold? And why does an obsolete Victorian law still make it a criminal offence...

23 Jul 28min

What does it mean when the sons of empire become the heroes of the nation that once ruled them? Four years later, what happens when one of those same colonies turns round and beats France on the bigge...

21 Jul 40min

How does a country where football is a minority sport end up hosting — and cashing in on — the biggest World Cup in history? What happens when FIFA stops behaving like a sporting federation and starts...

15 Jul 33min

How does a country only three decades free of colonial rule end up humiliating the reigning world champions in the opening match? What happens when the last World Cup of the Cold War arrives just mont...

14 Jul 34min