
Yuri Gagarin: The First Human to Leave Our Planet
On April 12th 1961 the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching the first man into space; Yuri Gagarin. Strapped to the top of a gigantic ICBM Gagarin was blasted into space as the result of a high...
12 Apr 202129min

300 years of British Prime Ministers: Part 2
Continuing our series looking at British Prime Ministers this episode tackles the period following the Battle of Waterloo all the way up to Winston Churchill. The brilliant Robert Saunders joins us to...
11 Apr 202157min

Prince Philip
Abandoned by his parents, exiled from his home, a veteran of Second World War battles, an author, the founder of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), this is the story of Prince Philip as you have ne...
9 Apr 202131min

The Xiongnu: History's First Nomadic Empire?
Between the 3rd century BC and the 1st century AD, the Xiongnu inhabited the area surrounding Mongolia. They influenced the later Hun Empire, and had connections with Ancient China and Persia, but wha...
9 Apr 202136min

What Britain Did to Nigeria
When we think of the British Empire we often think of India, Pakistan, Singapore, Burma or perhaps South Africa but an often underrepresented part of the colonial picture is that of west Africa and sp...
8 Apr 202127min

Catherine the Great
Catherine the Great came from minor German nobility to become Empress of Russia and one of the most extraordinary women of the eighteenth century. Dan is joined today on the podcast by Hilde Hoogenboo...
7 Apr 202133min

30 Years since the Kurdish Uprising
In the aftermath of the First Gulf War, groups rose up against Saddam Hussein's regime in a bid to win independence from Baghdad with devastating results for those involved and in particular for the K...
6 Apr 202127min

Will This Be the New Roaring 20s?
Our impressions of the Roaring 20s are a time of economic growth, social change and in some cases wild debauchery, but were the Roaring 20s really a thing and what were they really like? As lockdown r...
5 Apr 202122min





















