253. Victorian Narcos: Drug Dealers Lead Britain to War (Ep 7)

The inculcation of Buddhism from India as the state religion in China was enabled by the violent rise of China’s only ever woman Emperor. Raised by pious Buddhist parents, Wu Zetian left a trail of bo...

28 Aug 202434min

It was actually India, not China, that was the greatest trading partner of the Roman Empire. During this era, it’s clear that sea travel was the fastest, most economical and safest way to move people ...

26 Aug 202441min

For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literatu...

21 Aug 202441min

With Richard Nixon now in the White House and not wanting to have his presidency consumed by Vietnam like his predecessor’s was, he begins to search for ways to disentangle America from the war. It be...

19 Aug 202455min

With the death of JFK, Lyndon B. Johnson took over the Presidency and immediately had to wrestle with America’s relationship with Vietnam after the killing of Diem. Right from the start he prophesised...

14 Aug 202456min

Vietnam, or Indochina as it was known, had been under French colonial rule since the nineteenth century. This was until the Vietnamese nationalist group, the Viet Minh, took on the French in 1946. Ho ...

12 Aug 20241h 2min

Following the fall of Batista, the Cuban revolution took a more radical turn. Castro was not a communist to begin with, but as those around him became increasingly Marxist, the CIA’s desire to regain ...

7 Aug 202454min

It’s 1959 and the swaggering Cuban revolutionary, Fidel Castro, has just overthrown the unpopular American backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Che Guevara, the Marxist physician whose face would becom...

5 Aug 202456min