180. England & Englishness

The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, the Habsburg dynasty's mightiest ruler, was at once King of Spain, Archduke of Austria, Lord of the Netherlands and Duke of Burgundy. With a lineage supposedly stretc...

1 Maj 202456min

"The First Emperor will die and his land will be divided….” The First Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, left behind him a monumental legacy: an Empire which would last millennia, the foundations of the...

28 Apr 20241h 1min

Rumours surrounding Lord Byron’s scandalous divorce rippled throughout the world. Finally, he had no choice but to abandon England in disgrace and flee to Italy, an exile but still the most famous man...

24 Apr 202454min

Good God I am surely in hell! Upon Lord Byron’s return to England and the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, he became one of the most notorious men in Europe and the world's first celebrity....

21 Apr 202458min

By 1809, Lord Byron found himself untethered and debt-ridden. Disenchanted with politics, frustrated by his literary career and haunted by his illicit homosexuality, he abandoned an oppressive England...

17 Apr 202458min

Few lives from history can have contained as many strange and exciting strands as that of Lord Byron's, whose story reflects the great dramas of the Napoleonic era. A vampiric hero of devilish charism...

14 Apr 202453min

Music for sex, dancing, and watching the straight world go by… The explosion of Disco provides an extraordinary window into the tumultuous world of the 1970s, with its themes of sex, drugs, race and...

10 Apr 202459min

“We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…” In his speech at Rice University, Texas, in Sep...

7 Apr 20241h 8min