The Revolution of The Chinese Script
What does it take to reinvent the world's oldest living language? China today is one of the world's most powerful nations, yet just a century ago it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for t...
23 Aug 202221min
The Voyage That Kickstarted Globalisation
In February 1882 the SS Dunedin departed New Zealand on a voyage that would revolutionise the way we eat and kickstart the globalisation of the world's food supply chain. Aboard were thousands of mutt...
22 Aug 202226min
100 Years of British Political Nightmares
Over Britain’s first century of mass democracy, from the Great Depression to the pandemic, politics has lurched from crisis to crisis. How does this history of political agony illuminate our current a...
21 Aug 202229min
Warships
Today we are talking warships: from the revolutionary Tudor ships to modern aircraft carriers, and all the innovations along the way.In this episode of Patented: History of Inventions Dan, a self-conf...
18 Aug 202231min
What happened to the bones of the Waterloo battlefield?
In June 1815 the French army under the command of Napoleon was decisively beaten by an allied army led by Britain and Prussia at Waterloo in what is now Belgium. This titanic clash took a terrible tol...
17 Aug 202239min
Walter Purdy: The Traitor of Colditz
In the Second World War, the Germans liked to boast that there was 'no escape' from the infamous fortress and POW camp Colditz. However, the elite British officers imprisoned there were determined to ...
16 Aug 202232min
The Tiananmen Square Massacre
In 1989, Beijing's Tiananmen Square became the focus of large-scale demonstrations as mostly young students crowded into central Beijing to protest for greater democracy. On June 4, 1989, Chinese troo...
15 Aug 202233min
Mutiny on The Bounty
Numerous novels, TV shows and as many as 5 movies- including the Hollywood classic starring Clarke Gable and Marlon Brando - have immortalised the story of the Mutiny on the Bounty in the popular imag...
14 Aug 202222min
